pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
An Explainable Vision Transformer with Transfer Learning Combined with Support Vector Machine Based Efficient Drought Stress Identification
Authors: Aswini Kumar Patra, Ankit Varshney, Lingaraj Sahoo
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Early detection of drought stress is critical for taking timely measures for reducing crop loss before the drought impact becomes irreversible. The subtle phenotypical and physiological changes in response to drought stress are captured by non-invasive imaging techniques and these imaging data serve as valuable resource for machine learning methods to identify drought stress. While convolutional neural networks (CNNs) are in wide use, vision transformers (ViTs) present a promising alternative in capturing long-range dependencies and intricate spatial relationships, thereby enhancing the detection of subtle indicators of drought stress. We propose an explainable deep learning pipeline that leverages the power of ViTs for drought stress detection in potato crops using aerial imagery. We applied two distinct approaches: a synergistic combination of ViT and support vector machine (SVM), where ViT extracts intricate spatial features from aerial images, and SVM classifies the crops as stressed or healthy and an end-to-end approach using a dedicated classification layer within ViT to directly detect drought stress. Our key findings explain the ViT model's decision-making process by visualizing attention maps. These maps highlight the specific spatial features within the aerial images that the ViT model focuses as the drought stress signature. Our findings demonstrate that the proposed methods not only achieve high accuracy in drought stress identification but also shedding light on the diverse subtle plant features associated with drought stress. This offers a robust and interpretable solution for drought stress monitoring for farmers to undertake informed decisions for improved crop management.
Synth-Empathy: Towards High-Quality Synthetic Empathy Data
Authors: Hao Liang, Linzhuang Sun, Jingxuan Wei, Xijie Huang, Linkun Sun, Bihui Yu, Conghui He, Wentao Zhang
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

In recent years, with the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs), achieving excellent empathetic response capabilities has become a crucial prerequisite. Consequently, managing and understanding empathetic datasets have gained increasing significance. However, empathetic data are typically human-labeled, leading to insufficient datasets and wasted human labor. In this work, we present Synth-Empathy, an LLM-based data generation and quality and diversity selection pipeline that automatically generates high-quality empathetic data while discarding low-quality data. With the data generated from a low empathetic model, we are able to further improve empathetic response performance and achieve state-of-the-art (SoTA) results across multiple benchmarks. Moreover, our model achieves SoTA performance on various human evaluation benchmarks, demonstrating its effectiveness and robustness in real-world applications. Furthermore, we show the trade-off between data quantity and quality, providing insights into empathetic data generation and selection.
Leveraging Self-Supervised Learning for Fetal Cardiac Planes Classification using Ultrasound Scan Videos
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00

Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods are popular since they can address situations with limited annotated data by directly utilising the underlying data distribution. However, the adoption of such methods is not explored enough in ultrasound (US) imaging, especially for fetal assessment. We investigate the potential of dual-encoder SSL in utilizing unlabelled US video data to improve the performance of challenging downstream Standard Fetal Cardiac Planes (SFCP) classification using limited labelled 2D US images. We study 7 SSL approaches based on reconstruction, contrastive loss, distillation, and information theory and evaluate them extensively on a large private US dataset. Our observations and findings are consolidated from more than 500 downstream training experiments under different settings. Our primary observation shows that for SSL training, the variance of the dataset is more crucial than its size because it allows the model to learn generalisable representations, which improve the performance of downstream tasks. Overall, the BarlowTwins method shows robust performance, irrespective of the training settings and data variations, when used as an initialisation for downstream tasks. Notably, full fine-tuning with 1% of labelled data outperforms ImageNet initialisation by 12% in F1-score and outperforms other SSL initialisations by at least 4% in F1-score, thus making it a promising candidate for transfer learning from US video to image data.
Diagnostic Runtime Monitoring with Martingales
Authors: Ali Hindy, Rachel Luo, Somrita Banerjee, Jonathan Kuck, Edward Schmerling, Marco Pavone
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

Machine learning systems deployed in safety-critical robotics settings must be robust to distribution shifts. However, system designers must understand the cause of a distribution shift in order to implement the appropriate intervention or mitigation strategy and prevent system failure. In this paper, we present a novel framework for diagnosing distribution shifts in a streaming fashion by deploying multiple stochastic martingales simultaneously. We show that knowledge of the underlying cause of a distribution shift can lead to proper interventions over the lifecycle of a deployed system. Our experimental framework can easily be adapted to different types of distribution shifts, models, and datasets. We find that our method outperforms existing work on diagnosing distribution shifts in terms of speed, accuracy, and flexibility, and validate the efficiency of our model in both simulated and live hardware settings.
ShieldGemma: Generative AI Content Moderation Based on Gemma
Authors: Wenjun Zeng, Yuchi Liu, Ryan Mullins, Ludovic Peran, Joe Fernandez, Hamza Harkous, Karthik Narasimhan, Drew Proud, Piyush Kumar, Bhaktipriya Radharapu, Olivia Sturman, Oscar Wahltinez
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00

We present ShieldGemma, a comprehensive suite of LLM-based safety content moderation models built upon Gemma2. These models provide robust, state-of-the-art predictions of safety risks across key harm types (sexually explicit, dangerous content, harassment, hate speech) in both user input and LLM-generated output. By evaluating on both public and internal benchmarks, we demonstrate superior performance compared to existing models, such as Llama Guard (+10.8\% AU-PRC on public benchmarks) and WildCard (+4.3\%). Additionally, we present a novel LLM-based data curation pipeline, adaptable to a variety of safety-related tasks and beyond. We have shown strong generalization performance for model trained mainly on synthetic data. By releasing ShieldGemma, we provide a valuable resource to the research community, advancing LLM safety and enabling the creation of more effective content moderation solutions for developers.
Deep Learning for Options Trading: An End-To-End Approach
Authors: Wee Ling Tan, Stephen Roberts, Stefan Zohren
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

We introduce a novel approach to options trading strategies using a highly scalable and data-driven machine learning algorithm. In contrast to traditional approaches that often require specifications of underlying market dynamics or assumptions on an option pricing model, our models depart fundamentally from the need for these prerequisites, directly learning non-trivial mappings from market data to optimal trading signals. Backtesting on more than a decade of option contracts for equities listed on the S&P 100, we demonstrate that deep learning models trained according to our end-to-end approach exhibit significant improvements in risk-adjusted performance over existing rules-based trading strategies. We find that incorporating turnover regularization into the models leads to further performance enhancements at prohibitively high levels of transaction costs.
A Comprehensive Survey on Retrieval Methods in Recommender Systems
Authors: JunJie Huang, Jizheng Chen, Jianghao Lin, Jiarui Qin, Ziming Feng, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval, Survey

In an era dominated by information overload, effective recommender systems are essential for managing the deluge of data across digital platforms. Multi-stage cascade ranking systems are widely used in the industry, with retrieval and ranking being two typical stages. Retrieval methods sift through vast candidates to filter out irrelevant items, while ranking methods prioritize these candidates to present the most relevant items to users. Unlike studies focusing on the ranking stage, this survey explores the critical yet often overlooked retrieval stage of recommender systems. To achieve precise and efficient personalized retrieval, we summarize existing work in three key areas: improving similarity computation between user and item, enhancing indexing mechanisms for efficient retrieval, and optimizing training methods of retrieval. We also provide a comprehensive set of benchmarking experiments on three public datasets. Furthermore, we highlight current industrial applications through a case study on retrieval practices at a specific company, covering the entire retrieval process and online serving, along with practical implications and challenges. By detailing the retrieval stage, which is fundamental for effective recommendation, this survey aims to bridge the existing knowledge gap and serve as a cornerstone for researchers interested in optimizing this critical component of cascade recommender systems.
An Autonomous GIS Agent Framework for Geospatial Data Retrieval
Authors: Huan Ning, Zhenlong Li, Temitope Akinboyewa, M. Naser Lessani
Date: 2024-07-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Powered by the emerging large language models (LLMs), autonomous geographic information systems (GIS) agents have the potential to accomplish spatial analyses and cartographic tasks. However, a research gap exists to support fully autonomous GIS agents: how to enable agents to discover and download the necessary data for geospatial analyses. This study proposes an autonomous GIS agent framework capable of retrieving required geospatial data by generating, executing, and debugging programs. The framework utilizes the LLM as the decision-maker, selects the appropriate data source (s) from a pre-defined source list, and fetches the data from the chosen source. Each data source has a handbook that records the metadata and technical details for data retrieval. The proposed framework is designed in a plug-and-play style to ensure flexibility and extensibility. Human users or autonomous data scrawlers can add new data sources by adding new handbooks. We developed a prototype agent based on the framework, released as a QGIS plugin (GeoData Retrieve Agent) and a Python program. Experiment results demonstrate its capability of retrieving data from various sources including OpenStreetMap, administrative boundaries and demographic data from the US Census Bureau, satellite basemaps from ESRI World Imagery, global digital elevation model (DEM) from OpenTopography.org, weather data from a commercial provider, the COVID-19 cases from the NYTimes GitHub. Our study is among the first attempts to develop an autonomous geospatial data retrieval agent.
E-Commerce Product Recommendation System based on ML Algorithms
Authors: Md. Zahurul Haque
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Product Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Algorithms are used in eCommerce product recommendation systems. These systems just recently began utilizing machine learning algorithms due to the development and growth of the artificial intelligence research community. This project aspires to transform how eCommerce platforms communicate with their users. We have created a model that can customize product recommendations and offers for each unique customer using cutting-edge machine learning techniques, we used PCA to reduce features and four machine learning algorithms like Gaussian Naive Bayes (GNB), Random Forest (RF), Logistic Regression (LR), Decision Tree (DT), the Random Forest algorithms achieve the highest accuracy of 99.6% with a 96.99 r square score, 1.92% MSE score, and 0.087 MAE score. The outcome is advantageous for both the client and the business. In this research, we will examine the model's development and training in detail and show how well it performs using actual data. Learning from machines can change of eCommerce world.
Multi-Grained Query-Guided Set Prediction Network for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition
Authors: Jielong Tang, zhenxing Wang, Ziyang Gong, Jianxing Yu, Xiangwei Zhu, Jian Yin
Date: 2024-07-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition, Machine Reading Comprehension, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Reading Comprehension, Sentence

Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition (GMNER) is an emerging information extraction (IE) task, aiming to simultaneously extract entity spans, types, and corresponding visual regions of entities from given sentence-image pairs data. Recent unified methods employing machine reading comprehension or sequence generation-based frameworks show limitations in this difficult task. The former, utilizing human-designed type queries, struggles to differentiate ambiguous entities, such as Jordan (Person) and off-White x Jordan (Shoes). The latter, following the one-by-one decoding order, suffers from exposure bias issues. We maintain that these works misunderstand the relationships of multimodal entities. To tackle these, we propose a novel unified framework named Multi-grained Query-guided Set Prediction Network (MQSPN) to learn appropriate relationships at intra-entity and inter-entity levels. Specifically, MQSPN explicitly aligns textual entities with visual regions by employing a set of learnable queries to strengthen intra-entity connections. Based on distinct intra-entity modeling, MQSPN reformulates GMNER as a set prediction, guiding models to establish appropriate inter-entity relationships from a optimal global matching perspective. Additionally, we incorporate a query-guided Fusion Net (QFNet) as a glue network to boost better alignment of two-level relationships. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performances in widely used benchmarks.
SAKR: Enhancing Retrieval-Augmented Generation via Streaming Algorithm and K-Means Clustering
Authors: Haoyu Kang, Yuzhou Zhu, Yukun Zhong, Ke Wang
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has achieved significant success in information retrieval to assist large language models LLMs because it builds an external knowledge database. However, it also has many problems, it consumes a lot of memory because of the enormous database, and it cannot update the established index database in time when confronted with massive streaming data. To reduce the memory required for building the database and maintain accuracy simultaneously, we proposed a new approach integrating a streaming algorithm with k-means clustering into RAG. Our approach applied a streaming algorithm to update the index dynamically and reduce memory consumption. Additionally, the k-means algorithm clusters highly similar documents, and the query time would be shortened. We conducted comparative experiments on four methods, and the results indicated that RAG with streaming algorithm and k-means clusters outperforms traditional RAG in accuracy and memory, particularly when dealing with large-scale streaming data.
Personalized Multi-task Training for Recommender System
Authors: Liangwei Yang, Zhiwei Liu, JianGuo Zhang, Rithesh Murthy, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Caiming Xiong, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Task Learning, Recommendation Systems, Representation Learning

In the vast landscape of internet information, recommender systems (RecSys) have become essential for guiding users through a sea of choices aligned with their preferences. These systems have applications in diverse domains, such as news feeds, game suggestions, and shopping recommendations. Personalization is a key technique in RecSys, where modern methods leverage representation learning to encode user/item interactions into embeddings, forming the foundation for personalized recommendations. However, integrating information from multiple sources to enhance recommendation performance remains challenging. This paper introduces a novel approach named PMTRec, the first personalized multi-task learning algorithm to obtain comprehensive user/item embeddings from various information sources. Addressing challenges specific to personalized RecSys, we develop modules to handle personalized task weights, diverse task orientations, and variations in gradient magnitudes across tasks. PMTRec dynamically adjusts task weights based on gradient norms for each user/item, employs a Task Focusing module to align gradient combinations with the main recommendation task, and uses a Gradient Magnitude Balancing module to ensure balanced training across tasks. Through extensive experiments on three real-world datasets with different scales, we demonstrate that PMTRec significantly outperforms existing multi-task learning methods, showcasing its effectiveness in achieving enhanced recommendation accuracy by leveraging multiple tasks simultaneously. Our contributions open new avenues for advancing personalized multi-task training in recommender systems.
ABCDE: Application-Based Cluster Diff Evals
Authors: Stephan van Staden, Alexander Grubb
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

This paper considers the problem of evaluating clusterings of very large populations of items. Given two clusterings, namely a Baseline clustering and an Experiment clustering, the tasks are twofold: 1) characterize their differences, and 2) determine which clustering is better. ABCDE is a novel evaluation technique for accomplishing that. It aims to be practical: it allows items to have associated importance values that are application-specific, it is frugal in its use of human judgements when determining which clustering is better, and it can report metrics for arbitrary slices of items, thereby facilitating understanding and debugging. The approach to measuring the delta in the clustering quality is novel: instead of trying to construct an expensive ground truth up front and evaluating the each clustering with respect to that, where the ground truth must effectively pre-anticipate clustering changes, ABCDE samples questions for judgement on the basis of the actual diffs between the clusterings. ABCDE builds upon the pointwise metrics for clustering evaluation, which make the ABCDE metrics intuitive and simple to understand. The mathematical elegance of the pointwise metrics equip ABCDE with rigorous yet practical ways to explore the clustering diffs and to estimate the quality delta.
Breaking the Hourglass Phenomenon of Residual Quantization: Enhancing the Upper Bound of Generative Retrieval
Authors: Zhirui Kuai, Zuxu Chen, Huimu Wang, Mingming Li, Dadong Miao, Binbin Wang, Xusong Chen, Li Kuang, Yuxing Han, Jiaxing Wang, Guoyu Tang, Lin Liu, Songlin Wang, Jingwei Zhuo
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

Generative retrieval (GR) has emerged as a transformative paradigm in search and recommender systems, leveraging numeric-based identifier representations to enhance efficiency and generalization. Notably, methods like TIGER employing Residual Quantization-based Semantic Identifiers (RQ-SID), have shown significant promise in e-commerce scenarios by effectively managing item IDs. However, a critical issue termed the "\textbf{Hourglass}" phenomenon, occurs in RQ-SID, where intermediate codebook tokens become overly concentrated, hindering the full utilization of generative retrieval methods. This paper analyses and addresses this problem by identifying data sparsity and long-tailed distribution as the primary causes. Through comprehensive experiments and detailed ablation studies, we analyze the impact of these factors on codebook utilization and data distribution. Our findings reveal that the "Hourglass" phenomenon substantially impacts the performance of RQ-SID in generative retrieval. We propose effective solutions to mitigate this issue, thereby significantly enhancing the effectiveness of generative retrieval in real-world E-commerce applications.
Learning Effective Representations for Retrieval Using Self-Distillation with Adaptive Relevance Margins
Authors: Lukas Gienapp, Niklas Deckers, Martin Potthast, Harrisen Scells
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval

Representation-based retrieval models, so-called biencoders, estimate the relevance of a document to a query by calculating the similarity of their respective embeddings. Current state-of-the-art biencoders are trained using an expensive training regime involving knowledge distillation from a teacher model and batch-sampling. Instead of relying on a teacher model, we contribute a novel parameter-free loss function for self-supervision that exploits the pre-trained language modeling capabilities of the encoder model as a training signal, eliminating the need for batch sampling by performing implicit hard negative mining. We investigate the capabilities of our proposed approach through extensive ablation studies, demonstrating that self-distillation can match the effectiveness of teacher distillation using only 13.5% of the data, while offering a speedup in training time between 3x and 15x compared to parametrized losses. Code and data is made openly available.
MOSAIC: Multimodal Multistakeholder-aware Visual Art Recommendation
Authors: Bereket A. Yilma, Luis A. Leiva
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Visual art (VA) recommendation is complex, as it has to consider the interests of users (e.g. museum visitors) and other stakeholders (e.g. museum curators). We study how to effectively account for key stakeholders in VA recommendations while also considering user-centred measures such as novelty, serendipity, and diversity. We propose MOSAIC, a novel multimodal multistakeholder-aware approach using state-of-the-art CLIP and BLIP backbone architectures and two joint optimisation objectives: popularity and representative selection of paintings across different categories. We conducted an offline evaluation using preferences elicited from 213 users followed by a user study with 100 crowdworkers. We found a strong effect of popularity, which was positively perceived by users, and a minimal effect of representativeness. MOSAIC's impact extends beyond visitors, benefiting various art stakeholders. Its user-centric approach has broader applicability, offering advancements for content recommendation across domains that require considering multiple stakeholders.