pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Efficient Pruning of Text-to-Image Models: Insights from Pruning Stable Diffusion
Authors: Samarth N Ramesh, Zhixue Zhao
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Model Compression

As text-to-image models grow increasingly powerful and complex, their burgeoning size presents a significant obstacle to widespread adoption, especially on resource-constrained devices. This paper presents a pioneering study on post-training pruning of Stable Diffusion 2, addressing the critical need for model compression in text-to-image domain. Our study tackles the pruning techniques for the previously unexplored multi-modal generation models, and particularly examines the pruning impact on the textual component and the image generation component separately. We conduct a comprehensive comparison on pruning the model or the single component of the model in various sparsities. Our results yield previously undocumented findings. For example, contrary to established trends in language model pruning, we discover that simple magnitude pruning outperforms more advanced techniques in text-to-image context. Furthermore, our results show that Stable Diffusion 2 can be pruned to 38.5% sparsity with minimal quality loss, achieving a significant reduction in model size. We propose an optimal pruning configuration that prunes the text encoder to 47.5% and the diffusion generator to 35%. This configuration maintains image generation quality while substantially reducing computational requirements. In addition, our work uncovers intriguing questions about information encoding in text-to-image models: we observe that pruning beyond certain thresholds leads to sudden performance drops (unreadable images), suggesting that specific weights encode critical semantics information. This finding opens new avenues for future research in model compression, interoperability, and bias identification in text-to-image models. By providing crucial insights into the pruning behavior of text-to-image models, our study lays the groundwork for developing more efficient and accessible AI-driven image generation systems
About Time: Advances, Challenges, and Outlooks of Action Understanding
Authors: Alexandros Stergiou, Ronald Poppe
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Understanding, Survey

We have witnessed impressive advances in video action understanding. Increased dataset sizes, variability, and computation availability have enabled leaps in performance and task diversification. Current systems can provide coarse- and fine-grained descriptions of video scenes, extract segments corresponding to queries, synthesize unobserved parts of videos, and predict context across multiple modalities. This survey comprehensively reviews advances in uni- and multi-modal action understanding across a range of tasks. We focus on prevalent challenges, overview widely adopted datasets, and survey seminal works with an emphasis on recent advances. We broadly distinguish between three temporal scopes: (1) recognition tasks of actions observed in full, (2) prediction tasks for ongoing partially observed actions, and (3) forecasting tasks for subsequent unobserved action(s). This division allows us to identify specific action modeling and video representation challenges. Finally, we outline future directions to address current shortcomings.
XGrammar: Flexible and Efficient Structured Generation Engine for Large Language Models
Authors: Yixin Dong, Charlie F. Ruan, Yaxing Cai, Ruihang Lai, Ziyi Xu, Yilong Zhao, Tianqi Chen
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

The applications of LLM Agents are becoming increasingly complex and diverse, leading to a high demand for structured outputs that can be parsed into code, structured function calls, and embodied agent commands. These developments bring significant demands for structured generation in LLM inference. Context-free grammar is a flexible approach to enable structured generation via constrained decoding. However, executing context-free grammar requires going through several stack states over all tokens in vocabulary during runtime, bringing non-negligible overhead for structured generation. In this paper, we propose XGrammar, a flexible and efficient structure generation engine for large language models. XGrammar accelerates context-free grammar execution by dividing the vocabulary into context-independent tokens that can be prechecked and context-dependent tokens that need to be interpreted during runtime. We further build transformations to expand the grammar context and reduce the number of context-independent tokens. Additionally, we build an efficient persistent stack to accelerate the context-dependent token checks. Finally, we co-design the grammar engine with LLM inference engine to overlap grammar computation with GPU executions. Evaluation results show that XGrammar can achieve up to 100x speedup over existing solutions. Combined with an LLM inference engine, it can generate near-zero overhead structure generation in end-to-end low-LLM serving.
OminiControl: Minimal and Universal Control for Diffusion Transformer
Authors: Zhenxiong Tan, Songhua Liu, Xingyi Yang, Qiaochu Xue, Xinchao Wang
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00

In this paper, we introduce OminiControl, a highly versatile and parameter-efficient framework that integrates image conditions into pre-trained Diffusion Transformer (DiT) models. At its core, OminiControl leverages a parameter reuse mechanism, enabling the DiT to encode image conditions using itself as a powerful backbone and process them with its flexible multi-modal attention processors. Unlike existing methods, which rely heavily on additional encoder modules with complex architectures, OminiControl (1) effectively and efficiently incorporates injected image conditions with only ~0.1% additional parameters, and (2) addresses a wide range of image conditioning tasks in a unified manner, including subject-driven generation and spatially-aligned conditions such as edges, depth, and more. Remarkably, these capabilities are achieved by training on images generated by the DiT itself, which is particularly beneficial for subject-driven generation. Extensive evaluations demonstrate that OminiControl outperforms existing UNet-based and DiT-adapted models in both subject-driven and spatially-aligned conditional generation. Additionally, we release our training dataset, Subjects200K, a diverse collection of over 200,000 identity-consistent images, along with an efficient data synthesis pipeline to advance research in subject-consistent generation.
RED: Effective Trajectory Representation Learning with Comprehensive Information
Authors: Silin Zhou, Shuo Shang, Lisi Chen, Christian S. Jensen, Panos Kalnis
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Travel Time Estimation

Trajectory representation learning (TRL) maps trajectories to vectors that can then be used for various downstream tasks, including trajectory similarity computation, trajectory classification, and travel-time estimation. However, existing TRL methods often produce vectors that, when used in downstream tasks, yield insufficiently accurate results. A key reason is that they fail to utilize the comprehensive information encompassed by trajectories. We propose a self-supervised TRL framework, called RED, which effectively exploits multiple types of trajectory information. Overall, RED adopts the Transformer as the backbone model and masks the constituting paths in trajectories to train a masked autoencoder (MAE). In particular, RED considers the moving patterns of trajectories by employing a Road-aware masking strategy} that retains key paths of trajectories during masking, thereby preserving crucial information of the trajectories. RED also adopts a spatial-temporal-user joint Embedding scheme to encode comprehensive information when preparing the trajectories as model inputs. To conduct training, RED adopts Dual-objective task learning}: the Transformer encoder predicts the next segment in a trajectory, and the Transformer decoder reconstructs the entire trajectory. RED also considers the spatial-temporal correlations of trajectories by modifying the attention mechanism of the Transformer. We compare RED with 9 state-of-the-art TRL methods for 4 downstream tasks on 3 real-world datasets, finding that RED can usually improve the accuracy of the best-performing baseline by over 5%.
Towards Speaker Identification with Minimal Dataset and Constrained Resources using 1D-Convolution Neural Network
Authors: Irfan Nafiz Shahan, Pulok Ahmed Auvi
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Speaker Identification, Transfer Learning

Voice recognition and speaker identification are vital for applications in security and personal assistants. This paper presents a lightweight 1D-Convolutional Neural Network (1D-CNN) designed to perform speaker identification on minimal datasets. Our approach achieves a validation accuracy of 97.87%, leveraging data augmentation techniques to handle background noise and limited training samples. Future improvements include testing on larger datasets and integrating transfer learning methods to enhance generalizability. We provide all code, the custom dataset, and the trained models to facilitate reproducibility. These resources are available on our GitHub repository: https://github.com/IrfanNafiz/RecMe.
Empowering Clients: Transformation of Design Processes Due to Generative AI
Authors: Johannes Schneider, Kilic Sinem, Daniel Stockhammer
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00

The domain of computational design, driven by advancements in Generative AI, is transforming creative fields. We explore the transformative effects of Generative AI on the architectural design process and discuss the role of the architect. The case of architecture is interesting as designing houses is complex, involving extensive customer interaction. We employ a within-subject experiment using a popular general-purpose text-to-image tool for generating designs and providing feedback on existing designs, followed by expert interviews. The study reveals that AI can disrupt the ideation phase by enabling clients to engage in the design process through rapid visualization of their own ideas. In turn, the architect's role shifts more towards assessing the feasibility of designs generated conjointly by clients and AI. Our study also shows that while AI can provide valuable feedback on designs, it might fail to generate such designs, allowing for interesting connections to foundations in computer science, i.e., NP-completeness. AI's feedback also tends to hamper creativity and innovation by suggesting altering novel, innovative approaches toward more standardized designs. Our study also reveals that there is uncertainty among architects about the interpretative sovereignty of architecture and loss of meaning and identity when AI increasingly takes over authorship in the design process.
Financial Risk Assessment via Long-term Payment Behavior Sequence Folding
Authors: Yiran Qiao, Yateng Tang, Xiang Ao, Qi Yuan, Ziming Liu, Chen Shen, Xuehao Zheng
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Relational Reasoning

Online inclusive financial services encounter significant financial risks due to their expansive user base and low default costs. By real-world practice, we reveal that utilizing longer-term user payment behaviors can enhance models' ability to forecast financial risks. However, learning long behavior sequences is non-trivial for deep sequential models. Additionally, the diverse fields of payment behaviors carry rich information, requiring thorough exploitation. These factors collectively complicate the task of long-term user behavior modeling. To tackle these challenges, we propose a Long-term Payment Behavior Sequence Folding method, referred to as LBSF. In LBSF, payment behavior sequences are folded based on merchants, using the merchant field as an intrinsic grouping criterion, which enables informative parallelism without reliance on external knowledge. Meanwhile, we maximize the utility of payment details through a multi-field behavior encoding mechanism. Subsequently, behavior aggregation at the merchant level followed by relational learning across merchants facilitates comprehensive user financial representation. We evaluate LBSF on the financial risk assessment task using a large-scale real-world dataset. The results demonstrate that folding long behavior sequences based on internal behavioral cues effectively models long-term patterns and changes, thereby generating more accurate user financial profiles for practical applications.
Enhancing Autonomous Driving Safety through World Model-Based Predictive Navigation and Adaptive Learning Algorithms for 5G Wireless Applications
Authors: Hong Ding, ZiMing Wang, Yi Ding, Hongjie Lin, SuYang Xi, Chia Chao Kang
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles, Decision Making, Navigate

Addressing the challenge of ensuring safety in ever-changing and unpredictable environments, particularly in the swiftly advancing realm of autonomous driving in today's 5G wireless communication world, we present Navigation Secure (NavSecure). This vision-based navigation framework merges the strengths of world models with crucial safety-focused decision-making capabilities, enabling autonomous vehicles to navigate real-world complexities securely. Our approach anticipates potential threats and formulates safer routes by harnessing the predictive capabilities of world models, thus significantly reducing the need for extensive real-world trial-and-error learning. Additionally, our method empowers vehicles to autonomously learn and develop through continuous practice, ensuring the system evolves and adapts to new challenges. Incorporating radio frequency technology, NavSecure leverages 5G networks to enhance real-time data exchange, improving communication and responsiveness. Validated through rigorous experiments under simulation-to-real driving conditions, NavSecure has shown exceptional performance in safety-critical scenarios, such as sudden obstacle avoidance. Results indicate that NavSecure excels in key safety metrics, including collision prevention and risk reduction, surpassing other end-to-end methodologies. This framework not only advances autonomous driving safety but also demonstrates how world models can enhance decision-making in critical applications. NavSecure sets a new standard for developing more robust and trustworthy autonomous driving systems, capable of handling the inherent dynamics and uncertainties of real-world environments.
One to rule them all: natural language to bind communication, perception and action
Authors: Simone Colombani, Dimitri Ognibene, Giuseppe Boccignone
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: All

In recent years, research in the area of human-robot interaction has focused on developing robots capable of understanding complex human instructions and performing tasks in dynamic and diverse environments. These systems have a wide range of applications, from personal assistance to industrial robotics, emphasizing the importance of robots interacting flexibly, naturally and safely with humans. This paper presents an advanced architecture for robotic action planning that integrates communication, perception, and planning with Large Language Models (LLMs). Our system is designed to translate commands expressed in natural language into executable robot actions, incorporating environmental information and dynamically updating plans based on real-time feedback. The Planner Module is the core of the system where LLMs embedded in a modified ReAct framework are employed to interpret and carry out user commands. By leveraging their extensive pre-trained knowledge, LLMs can effectively process user requests without the need to introduce new knowledge on the changing environment. The modified ReAct framework further enhances the execution space by providing real-time environmental perception and the outcomes of physical actions. By combining robust and dynamic semantic map representations as graphs with control components and failure explanations, this architecture enhances a robot adaptability, task execution, and seamless collaboration with human users in shared and dynamic environments. Through the integration of continuous feedback loops with the environment the system can dynamically adjusts the plan to accommodate unexpected changes, optimizing the robot ability to perform tasks. Using a dataset of previous experience is possible to provide detailed feedback about the failure. Updating the LLMs context of the next iteration with suggestion on how to overcame the issue.
Time is on my sight: scene graph filtering for dynamic environment perception in an LLM-driven robot
Authors: Simone Colombani, Luca Brini, Dimitri Ognibene, Giuseppe Boccignone
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Localization, Task Planning

Robots are increasingly being used in dynamic environments like workplaces, hospitals, and homes. As a result, interactions with robots must be simple and intuitive, with robots perception adapting efficiently to human-induced changes. This paper presents a robot control architecture that addresses key challenges in human-robot interaction, with a particular focus on the dynamic creation and continuous update of the robot state representation. The architecture uses Large Language Models to integrate diverse information sources, including natural language commands, robotic skills representation, real-time dynamic semantic mapping of the perceived scene. This enables flexible and adaptive robotic behavior in complex, dynamic environments. Traditional robotic systems often rely on static, pre-programmed instructions and settings, limiting their adaptability to dynamic environments and real-time collaboration. In contrast, this architecture uses LLMs to interpret complex, high-level instructions and generate actionable plans that enhance human-robot collaboration. At its core, the system Perception Module generates and continuously updates a semantic scene graph using RGB-D sensor data, providing a detailed and structured representation of the environment. A particle filter is employed to ensure accurate object localization in dynamic, real-world settings. The Planner Module leverages this up-to-date semantic map to break down high-level tasks into sub-tasks and link them to robotic skills such as navigation, object manipulation (e.g., PICK and PLACE), and movement (e.g., GOTO). By combining real-time perception, state tracking, and LLM-driven communication and task planning, the architecture enhances adaptability, task efficiency, and human-robot collaboration in dynamic environments.
FTA generation using GenAI with an Autonomy sensor Usecase
Authors: Sneha Sudhir Shetiya, Divya Garikapati, Veeraja Sohoni
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Prompt Engineering

Functional safety forms an important aspect in the design of systems. Its emphasis on the automotive industry has evolved significantly over the years. Till date many methods have been developed to get appropriate FTA(Fault Tree analysis) for various scenarios and features pertaining to Autonomous Driving. This paper is an attempt to explore the scope of using Generative Artificial Intelligence(GenAI) in order to develop Fault Tree Analysis(FTA) with the use case of malfunction for the Lidar sensor in mind. We explore various available open source Large Language Models(LLM) models and then dive deep into one of them to study its responses and provide our analysis. This paper successfully shows the possibility to train existing Large Language models through Prompt Engineering for fault tree analysis for any Autonomy usecase aided with PlantUML tool.
ScribeAgent: Towards Specialized Web Agents Using Production-Scale Workflow Data
Authors: Junhong Shen, Atishay Jain, Zedian Xiao, Ishan Amlekar, Mouad Hadji, Aaron Podolny, Ameet Talwalkar
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large Language Model (LLM) agents are rapidly improving to handle increasingly complex web-based tasks. Most of these agents rely on general-purpose, proprietary models like GPT-4 and focus on designing better prompts to improve their planning abilities. However, general-purpose LLMs are not specifically trained to understand specialized web contexts such as HTML, and they often struggle with long-horizon planning. We explore an alternative approach that fine-tunes open-source LLMs using production-scale workflow data collected from over 250 domains corresponding to 6 billion tokens. This simple yet effective approach shows substantial gains over prompting-based agents on existing benchmarks -- ScribeAgent achieves state-of-the-art direct generation performance on Mind2Web and improves the task success rate by 7.3% over the previous best text-only web agents on WebArena. We further perform detailed ablation studies on various fine-tuning design choices and provide insights into LLM selection, training recipes, context window optimization, and effect of dataset sizes.
Learning Lifted STRIPS Models from Action Traces Alone: A Simple, General, and Scalable Solution
Authors: Jonas Gösgens, Niklas Jansen, Hector Geffner
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00

Learning STRIPS action models from action traces alone is a challenging problem as it involves learning the domain predicates as well. In this work, a novel approach is introduced which, like the well-known LOCM systems, is scalable, but like SAT approaches, is sound and complete. Furthermore, the approach is general and imposes no restrictions on the hidden domain or the number or arity of the predicates. The new learning method is based on an \emph{efficient, novel test} that checks whether the assumption that a predicate is affected by a set of action patterns, namely, actions with specific argument positions, is consistent with the traces. The predicates and action patterns that pass the test provide the basis for the learned domain that is then easily completed with preconditions and static predicates. The new method is studied theoretically and experimentally. For the latter, the method is evaluated on traces and graphs obtained from standard classical domains like the 8-puzzle, which involve hundreds of thousands of states and transitions. The learned representations are then verified on larger instances.