pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ssProp: Energy-Efficient Training for Convolutional Neural Networks with Scheduled Sparse Back Propagation
Authors: Lujia Zhong, Shuo Huang, Yonggang Shi
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, image-classification, Image Classification, Sparse Learning

Recently, deep learning has made remarkable strides, especially with generative modeling, such as large language models and probabilistic diffusion models. However, training these models often involves significant computational resources, requiring billions of petaFLOPs. This high resource consumption results in substantial energy usage and a large carbon footprint, raising critical environmental concerns. Back-propagation (BP) is a major source of computational expense during training deep learning models. To advance research on energy-efficient training and allow for sparse learning on any machine and device, we propose a general, energy-efficient convolution module that can be seamlessly integrated into any deep learning architecture. Specifically, we introduce channel-wise sparsity with additional gradient selection schedulers during backward based on the assumption that BP is often dense and inefficient, which can lead to over-fitting and high computational consumption. Our experiments demonstrate that our approach reduces 40\% computations while potentially improving model performance, validated on image classification and generation tasks. This reduction can lead to significant energy savings and a lower carbon footprint during the research and development phases of large-scale AI systems. Additionally, our method mitigates over-fitting in a manner distinct from Dropout, allowing it to be combined with Dropout to further enhance model performance and reduce computational resource usage. Extensive experiments validate that our method generalizes to a variety of datasets and tasks and is compatible with a wide range of deep learning architectures and modules. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/lujiazho/ssProp.
Data Quality Antipatterns for Software Analytics
Authors: Aaditya Bhatia, Dayi Lin, Gopi Krishnan Rajbahadur, Bram Adams, Ahmed E. Hassan
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00

Background: Data quality is vital in software analytics, particularly for machine learning (ML) applications like software defect prediction (SDP). Despite the widespread use of ML in software engineering, the effect of data quality antipatterns on these models remains underexplored. Objective: This study develops a taxonomy of ML-specific data quality antipatterns and assesses their impact on software analytics models' performance and interpretation. Methods: We identified eight types and 14 sub-types of ML-specific data quality antipatterns through a literature review. We conducted experiments to determine the prevalence of these antipatterns in SDP data (RQ1), assess how cleaning order affects model performance (RQ2), evaluate the impact of antipattern removal on performance (RQ3), and examine the consistency of interpretation from models built with different antipatterns (RQ4). Results: In our SDP case study, we identified nine antipatterns. Over 90% of these overlapped at both row and column levels, complicating cleaning prioritization and risking excessive data removal. The order of cleaning significantly impacts ML model performance, with neural networks being more resilient to cleaning order changes than simpler models like logistic regression. Antipatterns such as Tailed Distributions and Class Overlap show a statistically significant correlation with performance metrics when other antipatterns are cleaned. Models built with different antipatterns showed moderate consistency in interpretation results. Conclusion: The cleaning order of different antipatterns impacts ML model performance. Five antipatterns have a statistically significant correlation with model performance when others are cleaned. Additionally, model interpretation is moderately affected by different data quality antipatterns.
Modeling Time-Variant Responses of Optical Compressors with Selective State Space Models
Authors: Riccardo Simionato, Stefano Fasciani
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: State Space Models

This paper presents a method for modeling optical dynamic range compressors using deep neural networks with Selective State Space models. The proposed approach surpasses previous methods based on recurrent layers by employing a Selective State Space block to encode the input audio. It features a refined technique integrating Feature-wise Linear Modulation and Gated Linear Units to adjust the network dynamically, conditioning the compression's attack and release phases according to external parameters. The proposed architecture is well-suited for low-latency and real-time applications, crucial in live audio processing. The method has been validated on the analog optical compressors TubeTech CL 1B and Teletronix LA-2A, which possess distinct characteristics. Evaluation is performed using quantitative metrics and subjective listening tests, comparing the proposed method with other state-of-the-art models. Results show that our black-box modeling methods outperform all others, achieving accurate emulation of the compression process for both seen and unseen settings during training. We further show a correlation between this accuracy and the sampling density of the control parameters in the dataset and identify settings with fast attack and slow release as the most challenging to emulate.
Automatic Organ and Pan-cancer Segmentation in Abdomen CT: the FLARE 2023 Challenge
Authors: Jun Ma, Yao Zhang, Song Gu, Cheng Ge, Ershuai Wang, Qin Zhou, Ziyan Huang, Pengju Lyu, Jian He, Bo wang
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Segmentation

Organ and cancer segmentation in abdomen Computed Tomography (CT) scans is the prerequisite for precise cancer diagnosis and treatment. Most existing benchmarks and algorithms are tailored to specific cancer types, limiting their ability to provide comprehensive cancer analysis. This work presents the first international competition on abdominal organ and pan-cancer segmentation by providing a large-scale and diverse dataset, including 4650 CT scans with various cancer types from over 40 medical centers. The winning team established a new state-of-the-art with a deep learning-based cascaded framework, achieving average Dice Similarity Coefficient scores of 92.3% for organs and 64.9% for lesions on the hidden multi-national testing set. The dataset and code of top teams are publicly available, offering a benchmark platform to drive further innovations https://codalab.lisn.upsaclay.fr/competitions/12239.
PCGRL+: Scaling, Control and Generalization in Reinforcement Learning Level Generators
Authors: Sam Earle, Zehua Jiang, Julian Togelius
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Robust Design

Procedural Content Generation via Reinforcement Learning (PCGRL) has been introduced as a means by which controllable designer agents can be trained based only on a set of computable metrics acting as a proxy for the level's quality and key characteristics. While PCGRL offers a unique set of affordances for game designers, it is constrained by the compute-intensive process of training RL agents, and has so far been limited to generating relatively small levels. To address this issue of scale, we implement several PCGRL environments in Jax so that all aspects of learning and simulation happen in parallel on the GPU, resulting in faster environment simulation; removing the CPU-GPU transfer of information bottleneck during RL training; and ultimately resulting in significantly improved training speed. We replicate several key results from prior works in this new framework, letting models train for much longer than previously studied, and evaluating their behavior after 1 billion timesteps. Aiming for greater control for human designers, we introduce randomized level sizes and frozen "pinpoints" of pivotal game tiles as further ways of countering overfitting. To test the generalization ability of learned generators, we evaluate models on large, out-of-distribution map sizes, and find that partial observation sizes learn more robust design strategies.
Advanced atom-level representations for protein flexibility prediction utilizing graph neural networks
Authors: Sina Sarparast, Aldo Zaimi, Maximilian Ebert, Michael-Rock Goldsmith
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Representation Learning

Protein dynamics play a crucial role in many biological processes and drug interactions. However, measuring, and simulating protein dynamics is challenging and time-consuming. While machine learning holds promise in deciphering the determinants of protein dynamics from structural information, most existing methods for protein representation learning operate at the residue level, ignoring the finer details of atomic interactions. In this work, we propose for the first time to use graph neural networks (GNNs) to learn protein representations at the atomic level and predict B-factors from protein 3D structures. The B-factor reflects the atomic displacement of atoms in proteins, and can serve as a surrogate for protein flexibility. We compared different GNN architectures to assess their performance. The Meta-GNN model achieves a correlation coefficient of 0.71 on a large and diverse test set of over 4k proteins (17M atoms) from the Protein Data Bank (PDB), outperforming previous methods by a large margin. Our work demonstrates the potential of representations learned by GNNs for protein flexibility prediction and other related tasks.
The Russian-focused embedders' exploration: ruMTEB benchmark and Russian embedding model design
Authors: Artem Snegirev, Maria Tikhonova, Anna Maksimova, Alena Fenogenova, Alexander Abramov
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Reranking, Retrieval, Semantic Textual Similarity, text-classification, Text Classification, text similarity

Embedding models play a crucial role in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by creating text embeddings used in various tasks such as information retrieval and assessing semantic text similarity. This paper focuses on research related to embedding models in the Russian language. It introduces a new Russian-focused embedding model called ru-en-RoSBERTa and the ruMTEB benchmark, the Russian version extending the Massive Text Embedding Benchmark (MTEB). Our benchmark includes seven categories of tasks, such as semantic textual similarity, text classification, reranking, and retrieval.The research also assesses a representative set of Russian and multilingual models on the proposed benchmark. The findings indicate that the new model achieves results that are on par with state-of-the-art models in Russian. We release the model ru-en-RoSBERTa, and the ruMTEB framework comes with open-source code, integration into the original framework and a public leaderboard.
MEDCO: Medical Education Copilots Based on A Multi-Agent Framework
Authors: Hao Wei, Jianing Qiu, Haibao Yu, Wu Yuan
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have had a significant impact on diverse research domains, including medicine and healthcare. However, the potential of LLMs as copilots in medical education remains underexplored. Current AI-assisted educational tools are limited by their solitary learning approach and inability to simulate the multi-disciplinary and interactive nature of actual medical training. To address these limitations, we propose MEDCO (Medical EDucation COpilots), a novel multi-agent-based copilot system specially developed to emulate real-world medical training environments. MEDCO incorporates three primary agents: an agentic patient, an expert doctor, and a radiologist, facilitating a multi-modal and interactive learning environment. Our framework emphasizes the learning of proficient question-asking skills, multi-disciplinary collaboration, and peer discussions between students. Our experiments show that simulated virtual students who underwent training with MEDCO not only achieved substantial performance enhancements comparable to those of advanced models, but also demonstrated human-like learning behaviors and improvements, coupled with an increase in the number of learning samples. This work contributes to medical education by introducing a copilot that implements an interactive and collaborative learning approach. It also provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of AI-integrated training paradigms.
GenderCARE: A Comprehensive Framework for Assessing and Reducing Gender Bias in Large Language Models
Authors: Kunsheng Tang, Wenbo Zhou, Jie Zhang, Aishan Liu, Gelei Deng, Shuai Li, Peigui Qi, Weiming Zhang, Tianwei Zhang, Nenghai Yu
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Data Augmentation, Fairness, Text Generation

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited remarkable capabilities in natural language generation, but they have also been observed to magnify societal biases, particularly those related to gender. In response to this issue, several benchmarks have been proposed to assess gender bias in LLMs. However, these benchmarks often lack practical flexibility or inadvertently introduce biases. To address these shortcomings, we introduce GenderCARE, a comprehensive framework that encompasses innovative Criteria, bias Assessment, Reduction techniques, and Evaluation metrics for quantifying and mitigating gender bias in LLMs. To begin, we establish pioneering criteria for gender equality benchmarks, spanning dimensions such as inclusivity, diversity, explainability, objectivity, robustness, and realisticity. Guided by these criteria, we construct GenderPair, a novel pair-based benchmark designed to assess gender bias in LLMs comprehensively. Our benchmark provides standardized and realistic evaluations, including previously overlooked gender groups such as transgender and non-binary individuals. Furthermore, we develop effective debiasing techniques that incorporate counterfactual data augmentation and specialized fine-tuning strategies to reduce gender bias in LLMs without compromising their overall performance. Extensive experiments demonstrate a significant reduction in various gender bias benchmarks, with reductions peaking at over 90% and averaging above 35% across 17 different LLMs. Importantly, these reductions come with minimal variability in mainstream language tasks, remaining below 2%. By offering a realistic assessment and tailored reduction of gender biases, we hope that our GenderCARE can represent a significant step towards achieving fairness and equity in LLMs. More details are available at https://github.com/kstanghere/GenderCARE-ccs24.
AI in radiological imaging of soft-tissue and bone tumours: a systematic review evaluating against CLAIM and FUTURE-AI guidelines
Authors: Douwe J. Spaanderman, Matthew Marzetti, Xinyi Wan, Andrew F. Scarsbrook, Philip Robinson, Edwin H. G. Oei, Jacob J. Visser, Robert Hemke, Kirsten van Langevelde, David F. Hanff, Geert J. L. H. van Leenders, Cornelis Verhoef, Dirk J. Gruühagen, Wiro J. Niessen, Stefan Klein, Martijn P. A. Starmans
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Prognosis, Translation

Soft-tissue and bone tumours (STBT) are rare, diagnostically challenging lesions with variable clinical behaviours and treatment approaches. This systematic review provides an overview of Artificial Intelligence (AI) methods using radiological imaging for diagnosis and prognosis of these tumours, highlighting challenges in clinical translation, and evaluating study alignment with the Checklist for AI in Medical Imaging (CLAIM) and the FUTURE-AI international consensus guidelines for trustworthy and deployable AI to promote the clinical translation of AI methods. The review covered literature from several bibliographic databases, including papers published before 17/07/2024. Original research in peer-reviewed journals focused on radiology-based AI for diagnosing or prognosing primary STBT was included. Exclusion criteria were animal, cadaveric, or laboratory studies, and non-English papers. Abstracts were screened by two of three independent reviewers for eligibility. Eligible papers were assessed against guidelines by one of three independent reviewers. The search identified 15,015 abstracts, from which 325 articles were included for evaluation. Most studies performed moderately on CLAIM, averaging a score of 28.9$\pm$7.5 out of 53, but poorly on FUTURE-AI, averaging 5.1$\pm$2.1 out of 30. Imaging-AI tools for STBT remain at the proof-of-concept stage, indicating significant room for improvement. Future efforts by AI developers should focus on design (e.g. define unmet clinical need, intended clinical setting and how AI would be integrated in clinical workflow), development (e.g. build on previous work, explainability), evaluation (e.g. evaluating and addressing biases, evaluating AI against best practices), and data reproducibility and availability (making documented code and data publicly available). Following these recommendations could improve clinical translation of AI methods.
Not All Samples Should Be Utilized Equally: Towards Understanding and Improving Dataset Distillation
Authors: Shaobo Wang, Yantai Yang, Qilong Wang, Kaixin Li, Linfeng Zhang, Junchi Yan
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Dataset Distillation

Dataset Distillation (DD) aims to synthesize a small dataset capable of performing comparably to the original dataset. Despite the success of numerous DD methods, theoretical exploration of this area remains unaddressed. In this paper, we take an initial step towards understanding various matching-based DD methods from the perspective of sample difficulty. We begin by empirically examining sample difficulty, measured by gradient norm, and observe that different matching-based methods roughly correspond to specific difficulty tendencies. We then extend the neural scaling laws of data pruning to DD to theoretically explain these matching-based methods. Our findings suggest that prioritizing the synthesis of easier samples from the original dataset can enhance the quality of distilled datasets, especially in low IPC (image-per-class) settings. Based on our empirical observations and theoretical analysis, we introduce the Sample Difficulty Correction (SDC) approach, designed to predominantly generate easier samples to achieve higher dataset quality. Our SDC can be seamlessly integrated into existing methods as a plugin with minimal code adjustments. Experimental results demonstrate that adding SDC generates higher-quality distilled datasets across 7 distillation methods and 6 datasets.
Predicting Solar Energy Generation with Machine Learning based on AQI and Weather Features
Authors: Arjun Shah, Varun Viswanath, Kashish Gandhi, Nilesh Madhukar Patil
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Prediction, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

This paper addresses the pressing need for an accurate solar energy prediction model, which is crucial for efficient grid integration. We explore the influence of the Air Quality Index and weather features on solar energy generation, employing advanced Machine Learning and Deep Learning techniques. Our methodology uses time series modeling and makes novel use of power transform normalization and zero-inflated modeling. Various Machine Learning algorithms and Conv2D Long Short-Term Memory model based Deep Learning models are applied to these transformations for precise predictions. Results underscore the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating enhanced prediction accuracy with Air Quality Index and weather features. We achieved a 0.9691 $R^2$ Score, 0.18 MAE, 0.10 RMSE with Conv2D Long Short-Term Memory model, showcasing the power transform technique's innovation in enhancing time series forecasting for solar energy generation. Such results help our research contribute valuable insights to the synergy between Air Quality Index, weather features, and Deep Learning techniques for solar energy prediction.
WCEbleedGen: A wireless capsule endoscopy dataset and its benchmarking for automatic bleeding classification, detection, and segmentation
Authors: Palak Handa, Manas Dhir, Amirreza Mahbod, Florian Schwarzhans, Ramona Woitek, Nidhi Goel, Deepak Gunjan
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Classification, Multi-Task Learning, Segmentation

Computer-based analysis of Wireless Capsule Endoscopy (WCE) is crucial. However, a medically annotated WCE dataset for training and evaluation of automatic classification, detection, and segmentation of bleeding and non-bleeding frames is currently lacking. The present work focused on development of a medically annotated WCE dataset called WCEbleedGen for automatic classification, detection, and segmentation of bleeding and non-bleeding frames. It comprises 2,618 WCE bleeding and non-bleeding frames which were collected from various internet resources and existing WCE datasets. A comprehensive benchmarking and evaluation of the developed dataset was done using nine classification-based, three detection-based, and three segmentation-based deep learning models. The dataset is of high-quality, is class-balanced and contains single and multiple bleeding sites. Overall, our standard benchmark results show that Visual Geometric Group (VGG) 19, You Only Look Once version 8 nano (YOLOv8n), and Link network (Linknet) performed best in automatic classification, detection, and segmentation-based evaluations, respectively. Automatic bleeding diagnosis is crucial for WCE video interpretations. This diverse dataset will aid in developing of real-time, multi-task learning-based innovative solutions for automatic bleeding diagnosis in WCE. The dataset and code are publicly available at https://zenodo.org/records/10156571 and https://github.com/misahub2023/Benchmarking-Codes-of-the-WCEBleedGen-dataset.
Relaxed Rotational Equivariance via $G$-Biases in Vision
Authors: Zhiqiang Wu, Yingjie Liu, Licheng Sun, Jian Yang, Hanlin Dong, Shing-Ho J. Lin, Xuan Tang, Jinpeng Mi, Bo Jin, Xian Wei
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00
Tasks: 2D Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection

Group Equivariant Convolution (GConv) can capture rotational equivariance from original data. It assumes uniform and strict rotational equivariance across all features as the transformations under the specific group. However, the presentation or distribution of real-world data rarely conforms to strict rotational equivariance, commonly referred to as Rotational Symmetry-Breaking (RSB) in the system or dataset, making GConv unable to adapt effectively to this phenomenon. Motivated by this, we propose a simple but highly effective method to address this problem, which utilizes a set of learnable biases called $G$-Biases under the group order to break strict group constraints and then achieve a Relaxed Rotational Equivariant Convolution (RREConv). To validate the efficiency of RREConv, we conduct extensive ablation experiments on the discrete rotational group $\mathcal{C}_n$. Experiments demonstrate that the proposed RREConv-based methods achieve excellent performance compared to existing GConv-based methods in both classification and 2D object detection tasks on the natural image datasets.