pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Label-Free Topic-Focused Summarization Using Query Augmentation
Authors: Wenchuan Mu, Kwan Hui Lim
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

In today's data and information-rich world, summarization techniques are essential in harnessing vast text to extract key information and enhance decision-making and efficiency. In particular, topic-focused summarization is important due to its ability to tailor content to specific aspects of an extended text. However, this usually requires extensive labelled datasets and considerable computational power. This study introduces a novel method, Augmented-Query Summarization (AQS), for topic-focused summarization without the need for extensive labelled datasets, leveraging query augmentation and hierarchical clustering. This approach facilitates the transferability of machine learning models to the task of summarization, circumventing the need for topic-specific training. Through real-world tests, our method demonstrates the ability to generate relevant and accurate summaries, showing its potential as a cost-effective solution in data-rich environments. This innovation paves the way for broader application and accessibility in the field of topic-focused summarization technology, offering a scalable, efficient method for personalized content extraction.
HDBN: A Novel Hybrid Dual-branch Network for Robust Skeleton-based Action Recognition
Authors: Jinfu Liu, Baiqiao Yin, Jiaying Lin, Jiajun Wen, Yue Li, Mengyuan Liu
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Skeleton Based Action Recognition

Skeleton-based action recognition has gained considerable traction thanks to its utilization of succinct and robust skeletal representations. Nonetheless, current methodologies often lean towards utilizing a solitary backbone to model skeleton modality, which can be limited by inherent flaws in the network backbone. To address this and fully leverage the complementary characteristics of various network architectures, we propose a novel Hybrid Dual-Branch Network (HDBN) for robust skeleton-based action recognition, which benefits from the graph convolutional network's proficiency in handling graph-structured data and the powerful modeling capabilities of Transformers for global information. In detail, our proposed HDBN is divided into two trunk branches: MixGCN and MixFormer. The two branches utilize GCNs and Transformers to model both 2D and 3D skeletal modalities respectively. Our proposed HDBN emerged as one of the top solutions in the Multi-Modal Video Reasoning and Analyzing Competition (MMVRAC) of 2024 ICME Grand Challenge, achieving accuracies of 47.95% and 75.36% on two benchmarks of the UAV-Human dataset by outperforming most existing methods. Our code will be publicly available at: https://github.com/liujf69/ICMEW2024-Track10.
Offline Reinforcement Learning with Behavioral Supervisor Tuning
Authors: Padmanaba Srinivasan, William Knottenbelt
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms are applied to learn performant, well-generalizing policies when provided with a static dataset of interactions. Many recent approaches to offline RL have seen substantial success, but with one key caveat: they demand substantial per-dataset hyperparameter tuning to achieve reported performance, which requires policy rollouts in the environment to evaluate; this can rapidly become cumbersome. Furthermore, substantial tuning requirements can hamper the adoption of these algorithms in practical domains. In this paper, we present TD3 with Behavioral Supervisor Tuning (TD3-BST), an algorithm that trains an uncertainty model and uses it to guide the policy to select actions within the dataset support. TD3-BST can learn more effective policies from offline datasets compared to previous methods and achieves the best performance across challenging benchmarks without requiring per-dataset tuning.
Fuzzy Inference System for Test Case Prioritization in Software Testing
Authors: Aron Karatayev, Anna Ogorodova, Pakizar Shamoi
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: software testing

In the realm of software development, testing is crucial for ensuring software quality and adherence to requirements. However, it can be time-consuming and resource-intensive, especially when dealing with large and complex software systems. Test case prioritization (TCP) is a vital strategy to enhance testing efficiency by identifying the most critical test cases for early execution. This paper introduces a novel fuzzy logic-based approach to automate TCP, using fuzzy linguistic variables and expert-derived fuzzy rules to establish a link between test case characteristics and their prioritization. Our methodology utilizes two fuzzy variables - failure rate and execution time - alongside two crisp parameters: Prerequisite Test Case and Recently Updated Flag. Our findings demonstrate the proposed system capacity to rank test cases effectively through experimental validation on a real-world software system. The results affirm the practical applicability of our approach in optimizing the TCP and reducing the resource intensity of software testing.
SwarmRL: Building the Future of Smart Active Systems
Authors: Samuel Tovey, Christoph Lohrmann, Tobias Merkt, David Zimmer, Konstantin Nikolaou, Simon Koppenhöfer, Anna Bushmakina, Jonas Scheunemann, Christian Holm
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning

This work introduces SwarmRL, a Python package designed to study intelligent active particles. SwarmRL provides an easy-to-use interface for developing models to control microscopic colloids using classical control and deep reinforcement learning approaches. These models may be deployed in simulations or real-world environments under a common framework. We explain the structure of the software and its key features and demonstrate how it can be used to accelerate research. With SwarmRL, we aim to streamline research into micro-robotic control while bridging the gap between experimental and simulation-driven sciences. SwarmRL is available open-source on GitHub at https://github.com/SwarmRL/SwarmRL.
Optimal and Bounded Suboptimal Any-Angle Multi-agent Pathfinding
Authors: Konstantin Yakovlev, Anton Andreychuk, Roni Stern
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00

Multi-agent pathfinding (MAPF) is the problem of finding a set of conflict-free paths for a set of agents. Typically, the agents' moves are limited to a pre-defined graph of possible locations and allowed transitions between them, e.g. a 4-neighborhood grid. We explore how to solve MAPF problems when each agent can move between any pair of possible locations as long as traversing the line segment connecting them does not lead to a collision with the obstacles. This is known as any-angle pathfinding. We present the first optimal any-angle multi-agent pathfinding algorithm. Our planner is based on the Continuous Conflict-based Search (CCBS) algorithm and an optimal any-angle variant of the Safe Interval Path Planning (TO-AA-SIPP). The straightforward combination of those, however, scales poorly since any-angle path finding induces search trees with a very large branching factor. To mitigate this, we adapt two techniques from classical MAPF to the any-angle setting, namely Disjoint Splitting and Multi-Constraints. Experimental results on different combinations of these techniques show they enable solving over 30% more problems than the vanilla combination of CCBS and TO-AA-SIPP. In addition, we present a bounded-suboptimal variant of our algorithm, that enables trading runtime for solution cost in a controlled manner.
List Items One by One: A New Data Source and Learning Paradigm for Multimodal LLMs
Authors: An Yan, Zhengyuan Yang, Junda Wu, Wanrong Zhu, Jianwei Yang, Linjie Li, Kevin Lin, JianFeng Wang, Julian McAuley, Jianfeng Gao, Lijuan Wang
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Grounding, Visual Question Answering, Visual Reasoning

Set-of-Mark (SoM) Prompting unleashes the visual grounding capability of GPT-4V, by enabling the model to associate visual objects with tags inserted on the image. These tags, marked with alphanumerics, can be indexed via text tokens for easy reference. Despite the extraordinary performance from GPT-4V, we observe that other Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) struggle to understand these visual tags. To promote the learning of SoM prompting for open-source models, we propose a new learning paradigm: "list items one by one," which asks the model to enumerate and describe all visual tags placed on the image following the alphanumeric orders of tags. By integrating our curated dataset with other visual instruction tuning datasets, we are able to equip existing MLLMs with the SoM prompting ability. Furthermore, we evaluate our finetuned SoM models on five MLLM benchmarks. We find that this new dataset, even in a relatively small size (10k-30k images with tags), significantly enhances visual reasoning capabilities and reduces hallucinations for MLLMs. Perhaps surprisingly, these improvements persist even when the visual tags are omitted from input images during inference. This suggests the potential of "list items one by one" as a new paradigm for training MLLMs, which strengthens the object-text alignment through the use of visual tags in the training stage. Finally, we conduct analyses by probing trained models to understand the working mechanism of SoM. Our code and data are available at \url{https://github.com/zzxslp/SoM-LLaVA}.
Guarding Graph Neural Networks for Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detection
Authors: Yuanchen Bei, Sheng Zhou, Jinke Shi, Yao Ma, Haishuai Wang, Jiajun Bu
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Graph Anomaly Detection

Unsupervised graph anomaly detection aims at identifying rare patterns that deviate from the majority in a graph without the aid of labels, which is important for a variety of real-world applications. Recent advances have utilized Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to learn effective node representations by aggregating information from neighborhoods. This is motivated by the hypothesis that nodes in the graph tend to exhibit consistent behaviors with their neighborhoods. However, such consistency can be disrupted by graph anomalies in multiple ways. Most existing methods directly employ GNNs to learn representations, disregarding the negative impact of graph anomalies on GNNs, resulting in sub-optimal node representations and anomaly detection performance. While a few recent approaches have redesigned GNNs for graph anomaly detection under semi-supervised label guidance, how to address the adverse effects of graph anomalies on GNNs in unsupervised scenarios and learn effective representations for anomaly detection are still under-explored. To bridge this gap, in this paper, we propose a simple yet effective framework for Guarding Graph Neural Networks for Unsupervised Graph Anomaly Detection (G3AD). Specifically, G3AD introduces two auxiliary networks along with correlation constraints to guard the GNNs from inconsistent information encoding. Furthermore, G3AD introduces an adaptive caching module to guard the GNNs from solely reconstructing the observed data that contains anomalies. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed G3AD can outperform seventeen state-of-the-art methods on both synthetic and real-world datasets.
VISLA Benchmark: Evaluating Embedding Sensitivity to Semantic and Lexical Alterations
Authors: Sri Harsha Dumpala, Aman Jaiswal, Chandramouli Sastry, Evangelos Milios, Sageev Oore, Hassan Sajjad
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Image to text, Sensitivity, Text Retrieval, Triplet

Despite their remarkable successes, state-of-the-art language models face challenges in grasping certain important semantic details. This paper introduces the VISLA (Variance and Invariance to Semantic and Lexical Alterations) benchmark, designed to evaluate the semantic and lexical understanding of language models. VISLA presents a 3-way semantic (in)equivalence task with a triplet of sentences associated with an image, to evaluate both vision-language models (VLMs) and unimodal language models (ULMs). An evaluation involving 34 VLMs and 20 ULMs reveals surprising difficulties in distinguishing between lexical and semantic variations. Spatial semantics encoded by language models also appear to be highly sensitive to lexical information. Notably, text encoders of VLMs demonstrate greater sensitivity to semantic and lexical variations than unimodal text encoders. Our contributions include the unification of image-to-text and text-to-text retrieval tasks, an off-the-shelf evaluation without fine-tuning, and assessing LMs' semantic (in)variance in the presence of lexical alterations. The results highlight strengths and weaknesses across diverse vision and unimodal language models, contributing to a deeper understanding of their capabilities. % VISLA enables a rigorous evaluation, shedding light on language models' capabilities in handling semantic and lexical nuances. Data and code will be made available at https://github.com/Sri-Harsha/visla_benchmark.
ReZero: Boosting MCTS-based Algorithms by Backward-view and Entire-buffer Reanalyze
Authors: Chunyu Xuan, Yazhe Niu, Yuan Pu, Shuai Hu, Yu Liu, Jing Yang
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Board Games, Decision Making

Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS)-based algorithms, such as MuZero and its derivatives, have achieved widespread success in various decision-making domains. These algorithms employ the reanalyze process to enhance sample efficiency from stale data, albeit at the expense of significant wall-clock time consumption. To address this issue, we propose a general approach named ReZero to boost tree search operations for MCTS-based algorithms. Specifically, drawing inspiration from the one-armed bandit model, we reanalyze training samples through a backward-view reuse technique which uses the value estimation of a certain child node to save the corresponding sub-tree search time. To further adapt to this design, we periodically reanalyze the entire buffer instead of frequently reanalyzing the mini-batch. The synergy of these two designs can significantly reduce the search cost and meanwhile guarantee or even improve performance, simplifying both data collecting and reanalyzing. Experiments conducted on Atari environments, DMControl suites and board games demonstrate that ReZero substantially improves training speed while maintaining high sample efficiency. The code is available as part of the LightZero MCTS benchmark at https://github.com/opendilab/LightZero.
Integration of Mixture of Experts and Multimodal Generative AI in Internet of Vehicles: A Survey
Authors: Minrui Xu, Dusit Niyato, Jiawen Kang, Zehui Xiong, Abbas Jamalipour, Yuguang Fang, Dong In Kim, Xuemin, Shen
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decision Making, Management, Mixture-of-Experts

Generative AI (GAI) can enhance the cognitive, reasoning, and planning capabilities of intelligent modules in the Internet of Vehicles (IoV) by synthesizing augmented datasets, completing sensor data, and making sequential decisions. In addition, the mixture of experts (MoE) can enable the distributed and collaborative execution of AI models without performance degradation between connected vehicles. In this survey, we explore the integration of MoE and GAI to enable Artificial General Intelligence in IoV, which can enable the realization of full autonomy for IoV with minimal human supervision and applicability in a wide range of mobility scenarios, including environment monitoring, traffic management, and autonomous driving. In particular, we present the fundamentals of GAI, MoE, and their interplay applications in IoV. Furthermore, we discuss the potential integration of MoE and GAI in IoV, including distributed perception and monitoring, collaborative decision-making and planning, and generative modeling and simulation. Finally, we present several potential research directions for facilitating the integration.
What Makes Multimodal In-Context Learning Work?
Authors: Folco Bertini Baldassini, Mustafa Shukor, Matthieu Cord, Laure Soulier, Benjamin Piwowarski
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

Large Language Models have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks, exhibiting the capacity to swiftly acquire new skills, such as through In-Context Learning (ICL) with minimal demonstration examples. In this work, we present a comprehensive framework for investigating Multimodal ICL (M-ICL) in the context of Large Multimodal Models. We consider the best open-source multimodal models (e.g., IDEFICS, OpenFlamingo) and a wide range of multimodal tasks. Our study unveils several noteworthy findings: (1) M-ICL primarily relies on text-driven mechanisms, showing little to no influence from the image modality. (2) When used with advanced-ICL strategy (like RICES), M-ICL is not better than a simple strategy based on majority voting over context examples. Moreover, we identify several biases and limitations of M-ICL that warrant consideration prior to deployment. Code available at https://gitlab.com/folbaeni/multimodal-icl
Retrieval and Distill: A Temporal Data Shift-Free Paradigm for Online Recommendation System
Authors: Lei Zheng, Ning li, Weinan Zhang, Yong Yu
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

Current recommendation systems are significantly affected by a serious issue of temporal data shift, which is the inconsistency between the distribution of historical data and that of online data. Most existing models focus on utilizing updated data, overlooking the transferable, temporal data shift-free information that can be learned from shifting data. We propose the Temporal Invariance of Association theorem, which suggests that given a fixed search space, the relationship between the data and the data in the search space keeps invariant over time. Leveraging this principle, we designed a retrieval-based recommendation system framework that can train a data shift-free relevance network using shifting data, significantly enhancing the predictive performance of the original model in the recommendation system. However, retrieval-based recommendation models face substantial inference time costs when deployed online. To address this, we further designed a distill framework that can distill information from the relevance network into a parameterized module using shifting data. The distilled model can be deployed online alongside the original model, with only a minimal increase in inference time. Extensive experiments on multiple real datasets demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the performance of the original model by utilizing shifting data.
Light-weight Retinal Layer Segmentation with Global Reasoning
Authors: Xiang He, Weiye Song, Yiming Wang, Fabio Poiesi, Ji Yi, Manishi Desai, Quanqing Xu, Kongzheng Yang, Yi Wan
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Segmentation

Automatic retinal layer segmentation with medical images, such as optical coherence tomography (OCT) images, serves as an important tool for diagnosing ophthalmic diseases. However, it is challenging to achieve accurate segmentation due to low contrast and blood flow noises presented in the images. In addition, the algorithm should be light-weight to be deployed for practical clinical applications. Therefore, it is desired to design a light-weight network with high performance for retinal layer segmentation. In this paper, we propose LightReSeg for retinal layer segmentation which can be applied to OCT images. Specifically, our approach follows an encoder-decoder structure, where the encoder part employs multi-scale feature extraction and a Transformer block for fully exploiting the semantic information of feature maps at all scales and making the features have better global reasoning capabilities, while the decoder part, we design a multi-scale asymmetric attention (MAA) module for preserving the semantic information at each encoder scale. The experiments show that our approach achieves a better segmentation performance compared to the current state-of-the-art method TransUnet with 105.7M parameters on both our collected dataset and two other public datasets, with only 3.3M parameters.
Training-Free Unsupervised Prompt for Vision-Language Models
Authors: Sifan Long, Linbin Wang, Zhen Zhao, Zichang Tan, Yiming Wu, Shengsheng Wang, Jingdong Wang
Date: 2024-04-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Learning

Prompt learning has become the most effective paradigm for adapting large pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs) to downstream tasks. Recently, unsupervised prompt tuning methods, such as UPL and POUF, directly leverage pseudo-labels as supervisory information to fine-tune additional adaptation modules on unlabeled data. However, inaccurate pseudo labels easily misguide the tuning process and result in poor representation capabilities. In light of this, we propose Training-Free Unsupervised Prompts (TFUP), which maximally preserves the inherent representation capabilities and enhances them with a residual connection to similarity-based prediction probabilities in a training-free and labeling-free manner. Specifically, we integrate both instance confidence and prototype scores to select representative samples, which are used to customize a reliable Feature Cache Model (FCM) for training-free inference. Then, we design a Multi-level Similarity Measure (MSM) that considers both feature-level and semantic-level similarities to calculate the distance between each test image and the cached sample as the weight of the corresponding cached label to generate similarity-based prediction probabilities. In this way, TFUP achieves surprising performance, even surpassing the training-base method on multiple classification datasets. Based on our TFUP, we propose a training-based approach (TFUP-T) to further boost the adaptation performance. In addition to the standard cross-entropy loss, TFUP-T adopts an additional marginal distribution entropy loss to constrain the model from a global perspective. Our TFUP-T achieves new state-of-the-art classification performance compared to unsupervised and few-shot adaptation approaches on multiple benchmarks. In particular, TFUP-T improves the classification accuracy of POUF by 3.3% on the most challenging Domain-Net dataset.