pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SSRFlow: Semantic-aware Fusion with Spatial Temporal Re-embedding for Real-world Scene Flow
Authors: Zhiyang Lu, Qinghan Chen, Zhimin Yuan, Ming Cheng
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00

Scene flow, which provides the 3D motion field of the first frame from two consecutive point clouds, is vital for dynamic scene perception. However, contemporary scene flow methods face three major challenges. Firstly, they lack global flow embedding or only consider the context of individual point clouds before embedding, leading to embedded points struggling to perceive the consistent semantic relationship of another frame. To address this issue, we propose a novel approach called Dual Cross Attentive (DCA) for the latent fusion and alignment between two frames based on semantic contexts. This is then integrated into Global Fusion Flow Embedding (GF) to initialize flow embedding based on global correlations in both contextual and Euclidean spaces. Secondly, deformations exist in non-rigid objects after the warping layer, which distorts the spatiotemporal relation between the consecutive frames. For a more precise estimation of residual flow at next-level, the Spatial Temporal Re-embedding (STR) module is devised to update the point sequence features at current-level. Lastly, poor generalization is often observed due to the significant domain gap between synthetic and LiDAR-scanned datasets. We leverage novel domain adaptive losses to effectively bridge the gap of motion inference from synthetic to real-world. Experiments demonstrate that our approach achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance across various datasets, with particularly outstanding results in real-world LiDAR-scanned situations. Our code will be released upon publication.
A Culturally-Aware Tool for Crowdworkers: Leveraging Chronemics to Support Diverse Work Styles
Authors: Carlos Toxtli, Christopher Curtis, Saiph Savage
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Crowdsourcing markets are expanding worldwide, but often feature standardized interfaces that ignore the cultural diversity of their workers, negatively impacting their well-being and productivity. To transform these workplace dynamics, this paper proposes creating culturally-aware workplace tools, specifically designed to adapt to the cultural dimensions of monochronic and polychronic work styles. We illustrate this approach with "CultureFit," a tool that we engineered based on extensive research in Chronemics and culture theories. To study and evaluate our tool in the real world, we conducted a field experiment with 55 workers from 24 different countries. Our field experiment revealed that CultureFit significantly improved the earnings of workers from cultural backgrounds often overlooked in design. Our study is among the pioneering efforts to examine culturally aware digital labor interventions. It also provides access to a dataset with over two million data points on culture and digital work, which can be leveraged for future research in this emerging field. The paper concludes by discussing the importance and future possibilities of incorporating cultural insights into the design of tools for digital labor.
Space-scale Exploration of the Poor Reliability of Deep Learning Models: the Case of the Remote Sensing of Rooftop Photovoltaic Systems
Authors: Gabriel Kasmi, Laurent Dubus, Yves-Marie Saint Drenan, Philippe Blanc
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Learning, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

Photovoltaic (PV) energy grows rapidly and is crucial for the decarbonization of electric systems. However, centralized registries recording the technical characteristifs of rooftop PV systems are often missing, making it difficult to accurately monitor this growth. The lack of monitoring could threaten the integration of PV energy into the grid. To avoid this situation, the remote sensing of rooftop PV systems using deep learning emerged as a promising solution. However, existing techniques are not reliable enough to be used by public authorities or transmission system operators (TSOs) to construct up-to-date statistics on the rooftop PV fleet. The lack of reliability comes from the fact that deep learning models are sensitive to distribution shifts. This work proposes a comprehensive evaluation of the effects of distribution shifts on the classification accuracy of deep learning models trained to detect rooftop PV panels on overhead imagery. We construct a benchmark to isolate the sources of distribution shift and introduce a novel methodology that leverages explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) and decomposition of the input image and model's decision in terms of scales to understand how distribution shifts affect deep learning models. Finally, based on our analysis, we introduce a data augmentation technique meant to improve the robustness of deep learning classifiers to varying acquisition conditions. We show that our proposed approach outperforms competing methods. We discuss some practical recommendations for mapping PV systems using overhead imagery and deep learning models.
Enhancing Ecological Monitoring with Multi-Objective Optimization: A Novel Dataset and Methodology for Segmentation Algorithms
Authors: Sophia J. Abraham, Jin Huang, Brandon RichardWebster, Michael Milford, Jonathan D. Hauenstein, Walter Scheirer
Date: 2024-07-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Semantic Segmentation

We introduce a unique semantic segmentation dataset of 6,096 high-resolution aerial images capturing indigenous and invasive grass species in Bega Valley, New South Wales, Australia, designed to address the underrepresented domain of ecological data in the computer vision community. This dataset presents a challenging task due to the overlap and distribution of grass species, which is critical for advancing models in ecological and agronomical applications. Our study features a homotopy-based multi-objective fine-tuning approach that balances segmentation accuracy and contextual consistency, applicable to various models. By integrating DiceCELoss for pixel-wise classification and a smoothness loss for spatial coherence, this method evolves during training to enhance robustness against noisy data. Performance baselines are established through a case study on the Segment Anything Model (SAM), demonstrating its effectiveness. Our annotation methodology, emphasizing pen size, zoom control, and memory management, ensures high-quality dataset creation. The dataset and code will be made publicly available, aiming to drive research in computer vision, machine learning, and ecological studies, advancing environmental monitoring and sustainable development.
A Scale-Invariant Sorting Criterion to Find a Causal Order in Additive Noise Models
Authors: Alexander G. Reisach, Myriam Tami, Christof Seiler, Antoine Chambaz, Sebastian Weichwald
Date: 2023-03-31 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11
Tasks: Benchmarking, Causal Discovery

Additive Noise Models (ANMs) are a common model class for causal discovery from observational data and are often used to generate synthetic data for causal discovery benchmarking. Specifying an ANM requires choosing all parameters, including those not fixed by explicit assumptions. Reisach et al. (2021) show that sorting variables by increasing variance often yields an ordering close to a causal order and introduce var-sortability to quantify this alignment. Since increasing variances may be unrealistic and are scale-dependent, ANM data are often standardized in benchmarks. We show that synthetic ANM data are characterized by another pattern that is scale-invariant: the explainable fraction of a variable's variance, as captured by the coefficient of determination $R^2$, tends to increase along the causal order. The result is high $R^2$-sortability, meaning that sorting the variables by increasing $R^2$ yields an ordering close to a causal order. We propose an efficient baseline algorithm termed $R^2$-SortnRegress that exploits high $R^2$-sortability and that can match and exceed the performance of established causal discovery algorithms. We show analytically that sufficiently high edge weights lead to a relative decrease of the noise contributions along causal chains, resulting in increasingly deterministic relationships and high $R^2$. We characterize $R^2$-sortability for different simulation parameters and find high values in common settings. Our findings reveal high $R^2$-sortability as an assumption about the data generating process relevant to causal discovery and implicit in many ANM sampling schemes. It should be made explicit, as its prevalence in real-world data is unknown. For causal discovery benchmarking, we implement $R^2$-sortability, the $R^2$-SortnRegress algorithm, and ANM simulation procedures in our library CausalDisco at https://causaldisco.github.io/CausalDisco/.
Enhancing Joint Multiple Intent Detection and Slot Filling with Global Intent-Slot Co-occurrence
Authors: Mengxiao Song, Bowen Yu, Li Quangang, Wang Yubin, Tingwen Liu, Hongbo Xu
Date: 2022-12-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing 2022 12
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Intent Detection, Semantic Frame Parsing, slot-filling, Slot Filling

Multi-intent detection and slot filling joint model attracts more and more attention since it can handle multi-intent utterances, which is closer to complex real-world scenarios. Most existing joint models rely entirely on the training procedure to obtain the implicit correlation between intents and slots. However, they ignore the fact that leveraging the rich global knowledge in the corpus can determine the intuitive and explicit correlation between intents and slots. In this paper, we aim to make full use of the statistical co-occurrence frequency between intents and slots as prior knowledge to enhance joint multiple intent detection and slot filling. To be specific, an intent-slot co-occurrence graph is constructed based on the entire training corpus to globally discover correlation between intents and slots. Based on the global intent-slot co-occurrence, we propose a novel graph neural network to model the interaction between the two subtasks. Experimental results on two public multi-intent datasets demonstrate that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art models.
Mapping urban large-area advertising structures using drone imagery and deep learning-based spatial data analysis
Authors: Bartosz Ptak, Marek Kraft
Date: 2024-07-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: Transactions in GIS 2024 7
Tasks: Instance Segmentation

The problem of visual pollution is a growing concern in urban areas, characterized by intrusive visual elements that can lead to overstimulation and distraction, obstructing views and causing distractions for drivers. Large-area advertising structures, such as billboards, while being effective advertisement mediums, are significant contributors to visual pollution. Illegally placed or huge billboards can also exacerbate those issues and pose safety hazards. Therefore, there is a pressing need for effective and efficient methods to identify and manage advertising structures in urban areas. This article proposes a deep-learning-based system for automatically detecting billboards using consumer-grade unmanned aerial vehicles. Thanks to the geospatial information from the drone's sensors, the position of billboards can be estimated. Side by side with the system, we share the very first dataset for billboard detection from a drone view. It contains 1361 images supplemented with spatial metadata, together with 5210 annotations.
String Diagram of Optimal Transports
Authors: Kazuki Watanabe, Noboru Isobe
Date: 2024-08-16 00:00:00

We present a novel hierarchical framework for optimal transport (OT) using string diagrams, namely string diagrams of optimal transports. This framework reduces complex hierarchical OT problems to standard OT problems, allowing efficient synthesis of optimal hierarchical transportation plans. Our approach uses algebraic compositions of cost matrices to effectively model hierarchical structures. We also study an adversarial situation with multiple choices in the cost matrices, where we present a polynomial-time algorithm for a relaxation of the problem. Experimental results confirm the efficiency and performance advantages of our proposed algorithm over the naive method.
PITN: Physics-Informed Temporal Networks for Cuffless Blood Pressure Estimation
Authors: Rui Wang, Mengshi Qi, Yingxia Shao, Anfu Zhou, Huadong Ma
Date: 2024-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Blood pressure estimation, Contrastive Learning, Time Series

Monitoring blood pressure with non-invasive sensors has gained popularity for providing comfortable user experiences, one of which is a significant function of smart wearables. Although providing a comfortable user experience, such methods are suffering from the demand for a significant amount of realistic data to train an individual model for each subject, especially considering the invasive or obtrusive BP ground-truth measurements. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel physics-informed temporal network~(PITN) with adversarial contrastive learning to enable precise BP estimation with very limited data. Specifically, we first enhance the physics-informed neural network~(PINN) with the temporal block for investigating BP dynamics' multi-periodicity for personal cardiovascular cycle modeling and temporal variation. We then employ adversarial training to generate extra physiological time series data, improving PITN's robustness in the face of sparse subject-specific training data. Furthermore, we utilize contrastive learning to capture the discriminative variations of cardiovascular physiologic phenomena. This approach aggregates physiological signals with similar blood pressure values in latent space while separating clusters of samples with dissimilar blood pressure values. Experiments on three widely-adopted datasets with different modailties (\emph{i.e.,} bioimpedance, PPG, millimeter-wave) demonstrate the superiority and effectiveness of the proposed methods over previous state-of-the-art approaches. The code is available at~\url{https://github.com/Zest86/ACL-PITN}.
Systemic values-at-risk and their sample-average approximations
Authors: Wissam AlAli, Çağın Ararat
Date: 2024-08-16 00:00:00

This paper investigates the convergence properties of sample-average approximations (SAA) for set-valued systemic risk measures. We assume that the systemic risk measure is defined using a general aggregation function with some continuity properties and value-at-risk applied as a monetary risk measure. We focus on the theoretical convergence of its SAA under Wijsman and Hausdorff topologies for closed sets. After building the general theory, we provide an in-depth study of an important special case where the aggregation function is defined based on the Eisenberg-Noe network model. In this case, we provide mixed-integer programming formulations for calculating the SAA sets via their weighted-sum and norm-minimizing scalarizations. To demonstrate the applicability of our findings, we conduct a comprehensive sensitivity analysis by generating a financial network based on the preferential attachment model and modeling the economic disruptions via a Pareto distribution.
Visual-Friendly Concept Protection via Selective Adversarial Perturbations
Authors: Xiaoyue Mi, Fan Tang, Juan Cao, Peng Li, Yang Liu
Date: 2024-08-16 00:00:00

Personalized concept generation by tuning diffusion models with a few images raises potential legal and ethical concerns regarding privacy and intellectual property rights. Researchers attempt to prevent malicious personalization using adversarial perturbations. However, previous efforts have mainly focused on the effectiveness of protection while neglecting the visibility of perturbations. They utilize global adversarial perturbations, which introduce noticeable alterations to original images and significantly degrade visual quality. In this work, we propose the Visual-Friendly Concept Protection (VCPro) framework, which prioritizes the protection of key concepts chosen by the image owner through adversarial perturbations with lower perceptibility. To ensure these perturbations are as inconspicuous as possible, we introduce a relaxed optimization objective to identify the least perceptible yet effective adversarial perturbations, solved using the Lagrangian multiplier method. Qualitative and quantitative experiments validate that VCPro achieves a better trade-off between the visibility of perturbations and protection effectiveness, effectively prioritizing the protection of target concepts in images with less perceptible perturbations.
xGen-MM (BLIP-3): A Family of Open Large Multimodal Models
Authors: Le Xue, Manli Shu, Anas Awadalla, Jun Wang, An Yan, Senthil Purushwalkam, Honglu Zhou, Viraj Prabhu, Yutong Dai, Michael S Ryoo, Shrikant Kendre, Jieyu Zhang, Can Qin, Shu Zhang, Chia-Chih Chen, Ning Yu, Juntao Tan, Tulika Manoj Awalgaonkar, Shelby Heinecke, Huan Wang, Yejin Choi, Ludwig Schmidt, Zeyuan Chen, Silvio Savarese, Juan Carlos Niebles, Caiming Xiong, ran Xu
Date: 2024-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

This report introduces xGen-MM (also known as BLIP-3), a framework for developing Large Multimodal Models (LMMs). The framework comprises meticulously curated datasets, a training recipe, model architectures, and a resulting suite of LMMs. xGen-MM, short for xGen-MultiModal, expands the Salesforce xGen initiative on foundation AI models. Our models undergo rigorous evaluation across a range of tasks, including both single and multi-image benchmarks. Our pre-trained base model exhibits strong in-context learning capabilities and the instruction-tuned model demonstrates competitive performance among open-source LMMs with similar model sizes. In addition, we introduce a safety-tuned model with DPO, aiming to mitigate harmful behaviors such as hallucinations and improve safety. We open-source our models, curated large-scale datasets, and our fine-tuning codebase to facilitate further advancements in LMM research. Associated resources will be available on our project page above.
GeoTransformer: Enhancing Urban Forecasting with Dependency Retrieval and Geospatial Attention
Authors: Yuhao Jia, Zile Wu, Shengao Yi, Yifei Sun
Date: 2024-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Demand Forecasting, Retrieval

Recent advances in urban forecasting have leveraged high-dimensional spatial data through two primary approaches: graph-based methods that rely on predefined spatial structures and region-based methods that use satellite imagery for local features. Although these methods have laid an important foundation, they struggle to integrate holistic urban information and dynamically model spatial dependencies. To address this gap, we propose GeoTransformer, a framework combining high-dimensional regional embeddings with dynamic spatial modeling. GeoTransformer features two innovations: (1) a dependency retrieval module identifying spatial dependencies to select relevant regions, and (2) a geospatial attention mechanism leveraging global urban information. These components unify structural and global urban information for better predictions. Extensive experiments on GDP and ride-share demand forecasting show that GeoTransformer outperforms baselines, highlighting its effectiveness in advancing urban forecasting tasks.
Optimal Symmetries in Binary Classification
Authors: Vishal S. Ngairangbam, Michael Spannowsky
Date: 2024-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Classification

We explore the role of group symmetries in binary classification tasks, presenting a novel framework that leverages the principles of Neyman-Pearson optimality. Contrary to the common intuition that larger symmetry groups lead to improved classification performance, our findings show that selecting the appropriate group symmetries is crucial for optimising generalisation and sample efficiency. We develop a theoretical foundation for designing group equivariant neural networks that align the choice of symmetries with the underlying probability distributions of the data. Our approach provides a unified methodology for improving classification accuracy across a broad range of applications by carefully tailoring the symmetry group to the specific characteristics of the problem. Theoretical analysis and experimental results demonstrate that optimal classification performance is not always associated with the largest equivariant groups possible in the domain, even when the likelihood ratio is invariant under one of its proper subgroups, but rather with those subgroups themselves. This work offers insights and practical guidelines for constructing more effective group equivariant architectures in diverse machine-learning contexts.
EasyRec: Simple yet Effective Language Models for Recommendation
Authors: Xubin Ren, Chao Huang
Date: 2024-08-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Contrastive Learning, Language Modelling, Recommendation Systems, Zero-Shot Learning

Deep neural networks have become a powerful technique for learning representations from user-item interaction data in collaborative filtering (CF) for recommender systems. However, many existing methods heavily rely on unique user and item IDs, which limits their ability to perform well in practical zero-shot learning scenarios where sufficient training data may be unavailable. Inspired by the success of language models (LMs) and their strong generalization capabilities, a crucial question arises: How can we harness the potential of language models to empower recommender systems and elevate its generalization capabilities to new heights? In this study, we propose EasyRec - an effective and easy-to-use approach that seamlessly integrates text-based semantic understanding with collaborative signals. EasyRec employs a text-behavior alignment framework, which combines contrastive learning with collaborative language model tuning, to ensure a strong alignment between the text-enhanced semantic space and the collaborative behavior information. Extensive empirical evaluations across diverse real-world datasets demonstrate the superior performance of EasyRec compared to state-of-the-art alternative models, particularly in the challenging text-based zero-shot recommendation scenarios. Furthermore, the study highlights the potential of seamlessly integrating EasyRec as a plug-and-play component into text-enhanced collaborative filtering frameworks, thereby empowering existing recommender systems to elevate their recommendation performance and adapt to the evolving user preferences in dynamic environments. For better result reproducibility of our EasyRec framework, the model implementation details, source code, and datasets are available at the link: https://github.com/HKUDS/EasyRec.