pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ImmersePro: End-to-End Stereo Video Synthesis Via Implicit Disparity Learning
Authors: Jian Shi, Zhenyu Li, Peter Wonka
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Disparity Estimation, SSIM, Video Generation

We introduce \textit{ImmersePro}, an innovative framework specifically designed to transform single-view videos into stereo videos. This framework utilizes a novel dual-branch architecture comprising a disparity branch and a context branch on video data by leveraging spatial-temporal attention mechanisms. \textit{ImmersePro} employs implicit disparity guidance, enabling the generation of stereo pairs from video sequences without the need for explicit disparity maps, thus reducing potential errors associated with disparity estimation models. In addition to the technical advancements, we introduce the YouTube-SBS dataset, a comprehensive collection of 423 stereo videos sourced from YouTube. This dataset is unprecedented in its scale, featuring over 7 million stereo pairs, and is designed to facilitate training and benchmarking of stereo video generation models. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of \textit{ImmersePro} in producing high-quality stereo videos, offering significant improvements over existing methods. Compared to the best competitor stereo-from-mono we quantitatively improve the results by 11.76\% (L1), 6.39\% (SSIM), and 5.10\% (PSNR).
MM-Conv: A Multi-modal Conversational Dataset for Virtual Humans
Authors: Anna Deichler, Jim O'Regan, Jonas Beskow
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Gesture Generation

In this paper, we present a novel dataset captured using a VR headset to record conversations between participants within a physics simulator (AI2-THOR). Our primary objective is to extend the field of co-speech gesture generation by incorporating rich contextual information within referential settings. Participants engaged in various conversational scenarios, all based on referential communication tasks. The dataset provides a rich set of multimodal recordings such as motion capture, speech, gaze, and scene graphs. This comprehensive dataset aims to enhance the understanding and development of gesture generation models in 3D scenes by providing diverse and contextually rich data.
OpenAnimals: Revisiting Person Re-Identification for Animals Towards Better Generalization
Authors: Saihui Hou, Panjian Huang, Zengbin Wang, YuAn Liu, Zeyu Li, Man Zhang, Yongzhen Huang
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Person Re-Identification

This paper addresses the challenge of animal re-identification, an emerging field that shares similarities with person re-identification but presents unique complexities due to the diverse species, environments and poses. To facilitate research in this domain, we introduce OpenAnimals, a flexible and extensible codebase designed specifically for animal re-identification. We conduct a comprehensive study by revisiting several state-of-the-art person re-identification methods, including BoT, AGW, SBS, and MGN, and evaluate their effectiveness on animal re-identification benchmarks such as HyenaID, LeopardID, SeaTurtleID, and WhaleSharkID. Our findings reveal that while some techniques generalize well, many do not, underscoring the significant differences between the two tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose ARBase, a strong \textbf{Base} model tailored for \textbf{A}nimal \textbf{R}e-identification, which incorporates insights from extensive experiments and introduces simple yet effective animal-oriented designs. Experiments demonstrate that ARBase consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving state-of-the-art performance across various benchmarks.
DreamStruct: Understanding Slides and User Interfaces via Synthetic Data Generation
Authors: Yi-Hao Peng, Faria Huq, Yue Jiang, Jason Wu, Amanda Xin Yue Li, Jeffrey Bigham, Amy Pavel
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Synthetic Data Generation

Enabling machines to understand structured visuals like slides and user interfaces is essential for making them accessible to people with disabilities. However, achieving such understanding computationally has required manual data collection and annotation, which is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To overcome this challenge, we present a method to generate synthetic, structured visuals with target labels using code generation. Our method allows people to create datasets with built-in labels and train models with a small number of human-annotated examples. We demonstrate performance improvements in three tasks for understanding slides and UIs: recognizing visual elements, describing visual content, and classifying visual content types.
Do Vision-Language Models Really Understand Visual Language?
Authors: Yifan Hou, Buse Giledereli, Yilei Tu, Mrinmaya Sachan
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00

Visual language is a system of communication that conveys information through symbols, shapes, and spatial arrangements. Diagrams are a typical example of a visual language depicting complex concepts and their relationships in the form of an image. The symbolic nature of diagrams presents significant challenges for building models capable of understanding them. Recent studies suggest that Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) can even tackle complex reasoning tasks involving diagrams. In this paper, we investigate this phenomenon by developing a comprehensive test suite to evaluate the diagram comprehension capability of LVLMs. Our test suite uses a variety of questions focused on concept entities and their relationships over a set of synthetic as well as real diagrams across domains to evaluate the recognition and reasoning abilities of models. Our evaluation of LVLMs shows that while they can accurately identify and reason about entities, their ability to understand relationships is notably limited. Further testing reveals that the decent performance on diagram understanding largely stems from leveraging their background knowledge as shortcuts to identify and reason about the relational information. Thus, we conclude that LVLMs have a limited capability for genuine diagram understanding, and their impressive performance in diagram reasoning is an illusion emanating from other confounding factors, such as the background knowledge in the models.
EEG Emotion Copilot: Optimizing Lightweight LLMs for Emotional EEG Interpretation with Assisted Medical Record Generation
Authors: Hongyu Chen, Weiming Zeng, Chengcheng Chen, Luhui Cai, Fei Wang, Yuhu Shi, Lei Wang, Wei zhang, Yueyang Li, Hongjie Yan, Wai Ting Siok, Nizhuan Wang
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Diagnostic, EEG, EEG Emotion Recognition, Emotion Recognition, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

In the fields of affective computing (AC) and brain-machine interface (BMI), the analysis of physiological and behavioral signals to discern individual emotional states has emerged as a critical research frontier. While deep learning-based approaches have made notable strides in EEG emotion recognition, particularly in feature extraction and pattern recognition, significant challenges persist in achieving end-to-end emotion computation, including real-time processing, individual adaptation, and seamless user interaction. This paper presents the EEG Emotion Copilot, a system optimizing a lightweight large language model (LLM) with 0.5B parameters operating in a local setting, which first recognizes emotional states directly from EEG signals, subsequently generates personalized diagnostic and treatment suggestions, and finally supports the automation of assisted electronic medical records. Specifically, we demonstrate the critical techniques in the novel data structure of prompt, model pruning and fine-tuning training, and deployment strategies aiming at improving real-time performance and computational efficiency. Extensive experiments show that our optimized lightweight LLM-based copilot achieves an enhanced intuitive interface for participant interaction, superior accuracy of emotion recognition and assisted electronic medical records generation, in comparison to such models with similar scale parameters or large-scale parameters such as 1.5B, 1.8B, 3B and 7B. In summary, through these efforts, the proposed copilot is expected to advance the application of AC in the medical domain, offering innovative solution to mental health monitoring. The codes will be released at https://github.com/NZWANG/EEG_Emotion_Copilot.
Multimodal Alignment of Histopathological Images Using Cell Segmentation and Point Set Matching for Integrative Cancer Analysis
Authors: Jun Jiang, Raymond Moore, Brenna Novotny, Leo Liu, Zachary Fogarty, Ray Guo, Markovic Svetomir, Chen Wang
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Cell Segmentation, Graph Matching, set matching

Histopathological imaging is vital for cancer research and clinical practice, with multiplexed Immunofluorescence (MxIF) and Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) providing complementary insights. However, aligning different stains at the cell level remains a challenge due to modality differences. In this paper, we present a novel framework for multimodal image alignment using cell segmentation outcomes. By treating cells as point sets, we apply Coherent Point Drift (CPD) for initial alignment and refine it with Graph Matching (GM). Evaluated on ovarian cancer tissue microarrays (TMAs), our method achieves high alignment accuracy, enabling integration of cell-level features across modalities and generating virtual H&E images from MxIF data for enhanced clinical interpretation.
CVVLSNet: Vehicle Location and Speed Estimation Using Partial Connected Vehicle Trajectory Data
Authors: Jiachen Ye, Dingyu Wang, Shaocheng Jia, Xin Pei, Zi Yang, Yi Zhang, S. C. Wong
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00

Real-time estimation of vehicle locations and speeds is crucial for developing many beneficial transportation applications in traffic management and control, e.g., adaptive signal control. Recent advances in communication technologies facilitate the emergence of connected vehicles (CVs), which can share traffic information with nearby CVs or infrastructures. At the early stage of connectivity, only a portion of vehicles are CVs. The locations and speeds for those non-CVs (NCs) are not accessible and must be estimated to obtain the full traffic information. To address the above problem, this paper proposes a novel CV-based Vehicle Location and Speed estimation network, CVVLSNet, to simultaneously estimate the vehicle locations and speeds exclusively using partial CV trajectory data. A road cell occupancy (RCO) method is first proposed to represent the variable vehicle state information. Spatiotemporal interactions can be integrated by simply fusing the RCO representations. Then, CVVLSNet, taking the Coding-RAte TransformEr (CRATE) network as a backbone, is introduced to estimate the vehicle locations and speeds. Moreover, physical vehicle size constraints are also considered in loss functions. Extensive experiments indicate that the proposed method significantly outperformed the existing method under various CV penetration rates, signal timings, and volume-to-capacity ratios.
An Overview of the Burer-Monteiro Method for Certifiable Robot Perception
Authors: Alan Papalia, Yulun Tian, David M. Rosen, Jonathan P. How, John J. Leonard
Date: 2024-09-30 00:00:00
Tasks: global-optimization

This paper presents an overview of the Burer-Monteiro method (BM), a technique that has been applied to solve robot perception problems to certifiable optimality in real-time. BM is often used to solve semidefinite programming relaxations, which can be used to perform global optimization for non-convex perception problems. Specifically, BM leverages the low-rank structure of typical semidefinite programs to dramatically reduce the computational cost of performing optimization. This paper discusses BM in certifiable perception, with three main objectives: (i) to consolidate information from the literature into a unified presentation, (ii) to elucidate the role of the linear independence constraint qualification (LICQ), a concept not yet well-covered in certifiable perception literature, and (iii) to share practical considerations that are discussed among practitioners but not thoroughly covered in the literature. Our general aim is to offer a practical primer for applying BM towards certifiable perception.
PROXI: Challenging the GNNs for Link Prediction
Authors: Astrit Tola, Jack Myrick, Baris Coskunuzer
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Graph Representation Learning, Link Prediction, Prediction, Representation Learning

Over the past decade, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have transformed graph representation learning. In the widely adopted message-passing GNN framework, nodes refine their representations by aggregating information from neighboring nodes iteratively. While GNNs excel in various domains, recent theoretical studies have raised concerns about their capabilities. GNNs aim to address various graph-related tasks by utilizing such node representations, however, this one-size-fits-all approach proves suboptimal for diverse tasks. Motivated by these observations, we conduct empirical tests to compare the performance of current GNN models with more conventional and direct methods in link prediction tasks. Introducing our model, PROXI, which leverages proximity information of node pairs in both graph and attribute spaces, we find that standard machine learning (ML) models perform competitively, even outperforming cutting-edge GNN models when applied to these proximity metrics derived from node neighborhoods and attributes. This holds true across both homophilic and heterophilic networks, as well as small and large benchmark datasets, including those from the Open Graph Benchmark (OGB). Moreover, we show that augmenting traditional GNNs with PROXI significantly boosts their link prediction performance. Our empirical findings corroborate the previously mentioned theoretical observations and imply that there exists ample room for enhancement in current GNN models to reach their potential.
On the expressiveness and spectral bias of KANs
Authors: YiXuan Wang, Jonathan W. Siegel, Ziming Liu, Thomas Y. Hou
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) \cite{liu2024kan} were very recently proposed as a potential alternative to the prevalent architectural backbone of many deep learning models, the multi-layer perceptron (MLP). KANs have seen success in various tasks of AI for science, with their empirical efficiency and accuracy demostrated in function regression, PDE solving, and many more scientific problems. In this article, we revisit the comparison of KANs and MLPs, with emphasis on a theoretical perspective. On the one hand, we compare the representation and approximation capabilities of KANs and MLPs. We establish that MLPs can be represented using KANs of a comparable size. This shows that the approximation and representation capabilities of KANs are at least as good as MLPs. Conversely, we show that KANs can be represented using MLPs, but that in this representation the number of parameters increases by a factor of the KAN grid size. This suggests that KANs with a large grid size may be more efficient than MLPs at approximating certain functions. On the other hand, from the perspective of learning and optimization, we study the spectral bias of KANs compared with MLPs. We demonstrate that KANs are less biased toward low frequencies than MLPs. We highlight that the multi-level learning feature specific to KANs, i.e. grid extension of splines, improves the learning process for high-frequency components. Detailed comparisons with different choices of depth, width, and grid sizes of KANs are made, shedding some light on how to choose the hyperparameters in practice.
Efficient $1$-bit tensor approximations
Authors: Alex W. Neal Riasanovsky, Sarah El Kazdadi
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model

We present a spatially efficient decomposition of matrices and arbitrary-order tensors as linear combinations of tensor products of $\{-1, 1\}$-valued vectors. For any matrix $A \in \mathbb{R}^{m \times n}$, $$A - R_w = S_w C_w T_w^\top = \sum_{j=1}^w c_j \cdot \mathbf{s}_j \mathbf{t}_j^\top$$ is a {\it $w$-width signed cut decomposition of $A$}. Here $C_w = "diag"(\mathbf{c}_w)$ for some $\mathbf{c}_w \in \mathbb{R}^w,$ and $S_w, T_w$, and the vectors $\mathbf{s}_j, \mathbf{t}_j$ are $\{-1, 1\}$-valued. To store $(S_w, T_w, C_w)$, we may pack $w \cdot (m + n)$ bits, and require only $w$ floating point numbers. As a function of $w$, $\|R_w\|_F$ exhibits exponential decay when applied to #f32 matrices with i.i.d. $\mathcal N (0, 1)$ entries. Choosing $w$ so that $(S_w, T_w, C_w)$ has the same memory footprint as a \textit{f16} or \textit{bf16} matrix, the relative error is comparable. Our algorithm yields efficient signed cut decompositions in $20$ lines of pseudocode. It reflects a simple modification from a celebrated 1999 paper [1] of Frieze and Kannan. As a first application, we approximate the weight matrices in the open \textit{Mistral-7B-v0.1} Large Language Model to a $50\%$ spatial compression. Remarkably, all $226$ remainder matrices have a relative error $<6\%$ and the expanded model closely matches \textit{Mistral-7B-v0.1} on the {\it huggingface} leaderboard [2]. Benchmark performance degrades slowly as we reduce the spatial compression from $50\%$ to $25\%$. We optimize our open source \textit{rust} implementation [3] with \textit{simd} instructions on \textit{avx2} and \textit{avx512} architectures. We also extend our algorithm from matrices to tensors of arbitrary order and use it to compress a picture of the first author's cat Angus.
Bellman Diffusion: Generative Modeling as Learning a Linear Operator in the Distribution Space
Authors: Yangming Li, Chieh-Hsin Lai, Carola-Bibiane Schönlieb, Yuki Mitsufuji, Stefano Ermon
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Distributional Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Deep Generative Models (DGMs), including Energy-Based Models (EBMs) and Score-based Generative Models (SGMs), have advanced high-fidelity data generation and complex continuous distribution approximation. However, their application in Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), particularly in distributional Reinforcement Learning (RL), remains underexplored, with conventional histogram-based methods dominating the field. This paper rigorously highlights that this application gap is caused by the nonlinearity of modern DGMs, which conflicts with the linearity required by the Bellman equation in MDPs. For instance, EBMs involve nonlinear operations such as exponentiating energy functions and normalizing constants. To address this, we introduce Bellman Diffusion, a novel DGM framework that maintains linearity in MDPs through gradient and scalar field modeling. With divergence-based training techniques to optimize neural network proxies and a new type of stochastic differential equation (SDE) for sampling, Bellman Diffusion is guaranteed to converge to the target distribution. Our empirical results show that Bellman Diffusion achieves accurate field estimations and is a capable image generator, converging 1.5x faster than the traditional histogram-based baseline in distributional RL tasks. This work enables the effective integration of DGMs into MDP applications, unlocking new avenues for advanced decision-making frameworks.
Knowledge-Driven Feature Selection and Engineering for Genotype Data with Large Language Models
Authors: Joseph Lee, Shu Yang, Jae Young Baik, Xiaoxi Liu, Zhen Tan, Dawei Li, Zixuan Wen, BoJian Hou, Duy Duong-Tran, Tianlong Chen, Li Shen
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection

Predicting phenotypes with complex genetic bases based on a small, interpretable set of variant features remains a challenging task. Conventionally, data-driven approaches are utilized for this task, yet the high dimensional nature of genotype data makes the analysis and prediction difficult. Motivated by the extensive knowledge encoded in pre-trained LLMs and their success in processing complex biomedical concepts, we set to examine the ability of LLMs in feature selection and engineering for tabular genotype data, with a novel knowledge-driven framework. We develop FREEFORM, Free-flow Reasoning and Ensembling for Enhanced Feature Output and Robust Modeling, designed with chain-of-thought and ensembling principles, to select and engineer features with the intrinsic knowledge of LLMs. Evaluated on two distinct genotype-phenotype datasets, genetic ancestry and hereditary hearing loss, we find this framework outperforms several data-driven methods, particularly on low-shot regimes. FREEFORM is available as open-source framework at GitHub: https://github.com/PennShenLab/FREEFORM.
Thermodynamic Bayesian Inference
Authors: Maxwell Aifer, Samuel Duffield, Kaelan Donatella, Denis Melanson, Phoebe Klett, Zach Belateche, Gavin Crooks, Antonio J. Martinez, Patrick J. Coles
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Model Selection, Uncertainty Quantification

A fully Bayesian treatment of complicated predictive models (such as deep neural networks) would enable rigorous uncertainty quantification and the automation of higher-level tasks including model selection. However, the intractability of sampling Bayesian posteriors over many parameters inhibits the use of Bayesian methods where they are most needed. Thermodynamic computing has emerged as a paradigm for accelerating operations used in machine learning, such as matrix inversion, and is based on the mapping of Langevin equations to the dynamics of noisy physical systems. Hence, it is natural to consider the implementation of Langevin sampling algorithms on thermodynamic devices. In this work we propose electronic analog devices that sample from Bayesian posteriors by realizing Langevin dynamics physically. Circuit designs are given for sampling the posterior of a Gaussian-Gaussian model and for Bayesian logistic regression, and are validated by simulations. It is shown, under reasonable assumptions, that the Bayesian posteriors for these models can be sampled in time scaling with $\ln(d)$, where $d$ is dimension. For the Gaussian-Gaussian model, the energy cost is shown to scale with $ d \ln(d)$. These results highlight the potential for fast, energy-efficient Bayesian inference using thermodynamic computing.
Learning To Solve Differential Equation Constrained Optimization Problems
Authors: Vincenzo Di Vito, Mostafa Mohammadian, Kyri Baker, Ferdinando Fioretto
Date: 2024-10-02 00:00:00

Differential equations (DE) constrained optimization plays a critical role in numerous scientific and engineering fields, including energy systems, aerospace engineering, ecology, and finance, where optimal configurations or control strategies must be determined for systems governed by ordinary or stochastic differential equations. Despite its significance, the computational challenges associated with these problems have limited their practical use. To address these limitations, this paper introduces a learning-based approach to DE-constrained optimization that combines techniques from proxy optimization and neural differential equations. The proposed approach uses a dual-network architecture, with one approximating the control strategies, focusing on steady-state constraints, and another solving the associated DEs. This combination enables the approximation of optimal strategies while accounting for dynamic constraints in near real-time. Experiments across problems in energy optimization and finance modeling show that this method provides full compliance with dynamic constraints and it produces results up to 25 times more precise than other methods which do not explicitly model the system's dynamic equations.