pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AMONGAGENTS: Evaluating Large Language Models in the Interactive Text-Based Social Deduction Game
Authors: Yizhou Chi, Lingjun Mao, Zineng Tang
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Strategic social deduction games serve as valuable testbeds for evaluating the understanding and inference skills of language models, offering crucial insights into social science, artificial intelligence, and strategic gaming. This paper focuses on creating proxies of human behavior in simulated environments, with Among Us utilized as a tool for studying simulated human behavior. The study introduces a text-based game environment, named AmongAgents, that mirrors the dynamics of Among Us. Players act as crew members aboard a spaceship, tasked with identifying impostors who are sabotaging the ship and eliminating the crew. Within this environment, the behavior of simulated language agents is analyzed. The experiments involve diverse game sequences featuring different configurations of Crewmates and Impostor personality archetypes. Our work demonstrates that state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) can effectively grasp the game rules and make decisions based on the current context. This work aims to promote further exploration of LLMs in goal-oriented games with incomplete information and complex action spaces, as these settings offer valuable opportunities to assess language model performance in socially driven scenarios.
Post-resonance reflections break the loss-vs-phase-resolution trade-off in microwave electronics
Authors: Bala Govind, Andreia Cathelin, Alyssa Apsel
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Astronomy

Precise phase control of microwaves and millimeter waves is critical for today's wireless communication and signal processing electronics. For decades, achieving even modest phase-shifting resolution has demanded a complex mix of transistor switches and passive electromagnetic structures. These true-phase delay, true-time-delay or quasi-true-time-delay circuits operate near resonances that heavily attenuate and distort signals, limiting transmission bandwidth. Despite numerous attempts, passive phase shifters have remained lossy and incompatible with high-channel-capacity beamforming, irrespective of the semiconductor fabrication process. In this article, we introduce a mechanism whereby waveguide reflectors based on coupled resonances can be reprogrammed to evade loss. Central to their operation is that loss from internal resonances is confined to low frequencies, while at high frequencies, their reflectivity is maximized and broadband phase variations, induced by those resonances, still persist. Since performance in the low-loss post-resonance spectrum is largely agnostic to the number of switches, ultra-fine digital tuning is possible. This breaks the historical tradeoff between loss and precision to achieve resolution surpassing state-of-the-art integrated circuits by over three orders (bits) of magnitude. The device does not distort the transmitted signal and consumes no power. Moreover, the chip occupies a sub-wavelength footprint in a Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor platform. This makes it an optimal candidate for seamless integration in on-chip multi-gigabit data links, radio astronomy transceivers and control hardware for millimeter-wave qubits.
Dynamic Retraining-Updating Mean Teacher for Source-Free Object Detection
Authors: Trinh Le Ba Khanh, Huy-Hung Nguyen, Long Hoang Pham, Duong Nguyen-Ngoc Tran, Jae Wook Jeon
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, object-detection, Object Detection, Source-Free Domain Adaptation, Source Free Object Detection, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

In object detection, unsupervised domain adaptation (UDA) aims to transfer knowledge from a labeled source domain to an unlabeled target domain. However, UDA's reliance on labeled source data restricts its adaptability in privacy-related scenarios. This study focuses on source-free object detection (SFOD), which adapts a source-trained detector to an unlabeled target domain without using labeled source data. Recent advancements in self-training, particularly with the Mean Teacher (MT) framework, show promise for SFOD deployment. However, the absence of source supervision significantly compromises the stability of these approaches. We identify two primary issues, (1) uncontrollable degradation of the teacher model due to inopportune updates from the student model, and (2) the student model's tendency to replicate errors from incorrect pseudo labels, leading to it being trapped in a local optimum. Both factors contribute to a detrimental circular dependency, resulting in rapid performance degradation in recent self-training frameworks. To tackle these challenges, we propose the Dynamic Retraining-Updating (DRU) mechanism, which actively manages the student training and teacher updating processes to achieve co-evolutionary training. Additionally, we introduce Historical Student Loss to mitigate the influence of incorrect pseudo labels. Our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in the SFOD setting on multiple domain adaptation benchmarks, comparable to or even surpassing advanced UDA methods. The code will be released at https://github.com/lbktrinh/DRU
Channel-Partitioned Windowed Attention And Frequency Learning for Single Image Super-Resolution
Authors: Dinh Phu Tran, Dao Duy Hung, Daeyoung Kim
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

Recently, window-based attention methods have shown great potential for computer vision tasks, particularly in Single Image Super-Resolution (SISR). However, it may fall short in capturing long-range dependencies and relationships between distant tokens. Additionally, we find that learning on spatial domain does not convey the frequency content of the image, which is a crucial aspect in SISR. To tackle these issues, we propose a new Channel-Partitioned Attention Transformer (CPAT) to better capture long-range dependencies by sequentially expanding windows along the height and width of feature maps. In addition, we propose a novel Spatial-Frequency Interaction Module (SFIM), which incorporates information from spatial and frequency domains to provide a more comprehensive information from feature maps. This includes information about the frequency content and enhances the receptive field across the entire image. Experimental findings show the effectiveness of our proposed modules and architecture. In particular, CPAT surpasses current state-of-the-art methods by up to 0.31dB at x2 SR on Urban100.
Stress-Testing Long-Context Language Models with Lifelong ICL and Task Haystack
Authors: Xiaoyue Xu, Qinyuan Ye, Xiang Ren
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Navigate

We introduce Lifelong ICL, a problem setting that challenges long-context language models (LMs) to learn a sequence of language tasks through in-context learning (ICL). We further introduce Task Haystack, an evaluation suite dedicated to assessing and diagnosing how long-context LMs utilizes contexts in Lifelong ICL. When given a task instruction and test inputs, long-context LMs are expected to leverage the relevant demonstrations in the Lifelong ICL prompt, avoid distraction and interference from other tasks, and achieve test accuracies that are not significantly worse than those of the Single-task ICL baseline. Task Haystack draws inspiration from the widely-adopted "needle-in-a-haystack" (NIAH) evaluation, but presents distinct new challenges. It requires models (1) to utilize the contexts at a deeper level, rather than resorting to simple copying and pasting; (2) to navigate through long streams of evolving topics and tasks, proxying the complexities and dynamism of contexts in real-world scenarios. Additionally, Task Haystack inherits the controllability of NIAH, providing model developers with tools and visualizations to identify model vulnerabilities effectively. We benchmark 14 long-context LMs using Task Haystack, finding that frontier models like GPT-4o still struggle with the setting, failing on 15% of cases on average. Most open-weight models further lack behind by a large margin, with failure rates reaching up to 61%. In our controlled analysis, we identify factors such as distraction and recency bias as contributors to these failure cases. Further, performance declines when task instructions are paraphrased at test time or when ICL demonstrations are repeated excessively, raising concerns about the robustness, instruction understanding, and true context utilization of long-context LMs.
KAN or MLP: A Fairer Comparison
Authors: Runpeng Yu, Weihao Yu, Xinchao Wang
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

This paper does not introduce a novel method. Instead, it offers a fairer and more comprehensive comparison of KAN and MLP models across various tasks, including machine learning, computer vision, audio processing, natural language processing, and symbolic formula representation. Specifically, we control the number of parameters and FLOPs to compare the performance of KAN and MLP. Our main observation is that, except for symbolic formula representation tasks, MLP generally outperforms KAN. We also conduct ablation studies on KAN and find that its advantage in symbolic formula representation mainly stems from its B-spline activation function. When B-spline is applied to MLP, performance in symbolic formula representation significantly improves, surpassing or matching that of KAN. However, in other tasks where MLP already excels over KAN, B-spline does not substantially enhance MLP's performance. Furthermore, we find that KAN's forgetting issue is more severe than that of MLP in a standard class-incremental continual learning setting, which differs from the findings reported in the KAN paper. We hope these results provide insights for future research on KAN and other MLP alternatives. Project link: https://github.com/yu-rp/KANbeFair
RedAgent: Red Teaming Large Language Models with Context-aware Autonomous Language Agent
Authors: Huiyu Xu, Wenhui Zhang, Zhibo Wang, Feng Xiao, Rui Zheng, Yunhe Feng, Zhongjie Ba, Kui Ren
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming

Recently, advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have been integrated into many real-world applications like Code Copilot. These applications have significantly expanded the attack surface of LLMs, exposing them to a variety of threats. Among them, jailbreak attacks that induce toxic responses through jailbreak prompts have raised critical safety concerns. To identify these threats, a growing number of red teaming approaches simulate potential adversarial scenarios by crafting jailbreak prompts to test the target LLM. However, existing red teaming methods do not consider the unique vulnerabilities of LLM in different scenarios, making it difficult to adjust the jailbreak prompts to find context-specific vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, these methods are limited to refining jailbreak templates using a few mutation operations, lacking the automation and scalability to adapt to different scenarios. To enable context-aware and efficient red teaming, we abstract and model existing attacks into a coherent concept called "jailbreak strategy" and propose a multi-agent LLM system named RedAgent that leverages these strategies to generate context-aware jailbreak prompts. By self-reflecting on contextual feedback in an additional memory buffer, RedAgent continuously learns how to leverage these strategies to achieve effective jailbreaks in specific contexts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our system can jailbreak most black-box LLMs in just five queries, improving the efficiency of existing red teaming methods by two times. Additionally, RedAgent can jailbreak customized LLM applications more efficiently. By generating context-aware jailbreak prompts towards applications on GPTs, we discover 60 severe vulnerabilities of these real-world applications with only two queries per vulnerability. We have reported all found issues and communicated with OpenAI and Meta for bug fixes.
A Framework for Pupil Tracking with Event Cameras
Authors: Khadija Iddrisu, Waseem Shariff, Suzanne Little
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Event-based vision, object-detection, Object Detection, Pupil Tracking

Saccades are extremely rapid movements of both eyes that occur simultaneously, typically observed when an individual shifts their focus from one object to another. These movements are among the swiftest produced by humans and possess the potential to achieve velocities greater than that of blinks. The peak angular speed of the eye during a saccade can reach as high as 700{\deg}/s in humans, especially during larger saccades that cover a visual angle of 25{\deg}. Previous research has demonstrated encouraging outcomes in comprehending neurological conditions through the study of saccades. A necessary step in saccade detection involves accurately identifying the precise location of the pupil within the eye, from which additional information such as gaze angles can be inferred. Conventional frame-based cameras often struggle with the high temporal precision necessary for tracking very fast movements, resulting in motion blur and latency issues. Event cameras, on the other hand, offer a promising alternative by recording changes in the visual scene asynchronously and providing high temporal resolution and low latency. By bridging the gap between traditional computer vision and event-based vision, we present events as frames that can be readily utilized by standard deep learning algorithms. This approach harnesses YOLOv8, a state-of-the-art object detection technology, to process these frames for pupil tracking using the publicly accessible Ev-Eye dataset. Experimental results demonstrate the framework's effectiveness, highlighting its potential applications in neuroscience, ophthalmology, and human-computer interaction.
A Geometry-Aware Algorithm to Learn Hierarchical Embeddings in Hyperbolic Space
Authors: Zhangyu Wang, Lantian Xu, Zhifeng Kong, Weilong Wang, Xuyu Peng, Enyang Zheng
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: ICLR Workshop GTRL 2021 5
Tasks: Representation Learning

Hyperbolic embeddings are a class of representation learning methods that offer competitive performances when data can be abstracted as a tree-like graph. However, in practice, learning hyperbolic embeddings of hierarchical data is difficult due to the different geometry between hyperbolic space and the Euclidean space. To address such difficulties, we first categorize three kinds of illness that harm the performance of the embeddings. Then, we develop a geometry-aware algorithm using a dilation operation and a transitive closure regularization to tackle these illnesses. We empirically validate these techniques and present a theoretical analysis of the mechanism behind the dilation operation. Experiments on synthetic and real-world datasets reveal superior performances of our algorithm.
Course-Correction: Safety Alignment Using Synthetic Preferences
Authors: Rongwu Xu, Yishuo Cai, Zhenhong Zhou, Renjie Gu, Haiqin Weng, Yan Liu, Tianwei Zhang, Wei Xu, Han Qiu
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Safety Alignment

The risk of harmful content generated by large language models (LLMs) becomes a critical concern. This paper presents a systematic study on assessing and improving LLMs' capability to perform the task of \textbf{course-correction}, \ie, the model can steer away from generating harmful content autonomously. To start with, we introduce the \textsc{C$^2$-Eval} benchmark for quantitative assessment and analyze 10 popular LLMs, revealing varying proficiency of current safety-tuned LLMs in course-correction. To improve, we propose fine-tuning LLMs with preference learning, emphasizing the preference for timely course-correction. Using an automated pipeline, we create \textsc{C$^2$-Syn}, a synthetic dataset with 750K pairwise preferences, to teach models the concept of timely course-correction through data-driven preference learning. Experiments on 2 LLMs, \textsc{Llama2-Chat 7B} and \textsc{Qwen2 7B}, show that our method effectively enhances course-correction skills without affecting general performance. Additionally, it effectively improves LLMs' safety, particularly in resisting jailbreak attacks.
Knowledge-driven AI-generated data for accurate and interpretable breast ultrasound diagnoses
Authors: Haojun Yu, Youcheng Li, Nan Zhang, Zihan Niu, Xuantong Gong, Yanwen Luo, Quanlin Wu, Wangyan Qin, Mengyuan Zhou, Jie Han, Jia Tao, Ziwei Zhao, Di Dai, Di He, Dong Wang, Binghui Tang, Ling Huo, Qingli Zhu, Yong Wang, LiWei Wang
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic, Specificity

Data-driven deep learning models have shown great capabilities to assist radiologists in breast ultrasound (US) diagnoses. However, their effectiveness is limited by the long-tail distribution of training data, which leads to inaccuracies in rare cases. In this study, we address a long-standing challenge of improving the diagnostic model performance on rare cases using long-tailed data. Specifically, we introduce a pipeline, TAILOR, that builds a knowledge-driven generative model to produce tailored synthetic data. The generative model, using 3,749 lesions as source data, can generate millions of breast-US images, especially for error-prone rare cases. The generated data can be further used to build a diagnostic model for accurate and interpretable diagnoses. In the prospective external evaluation, our diagnostic model outperforms the average performance of nine radiologists by 33.5% in specificity with the same sensitivity, improving their performance by providing predictions with an interpretable decision-making process. Moreover, on ductal carcinoma in situ (DCIS), our diagnostic model outperforms all radiologists by a large margin, with only 34 DCIS lesions in the source data. We believe that TAILOR can potentially be extended to various diseases and imaging modalities.
Implementing engrams from a machine learning perspective: the relevance of a latent space
Authors: J Marco de Lucas
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00

In our previous work, we proposed that engrams in the brain could be biologically implemented as autoencoders over recurrent neural networks. These autoencoders would comprise basic excitatory/inhibitory motifs, with credit assignment deriving from a simple homeostatic criterion. This brief note examines the relevance of the latent space in these autoencoders. We consider the relationship between the dimensionality of these autoencoders and the complexity of the information being encoded. We discuss how observed differences between species in their connectome could be linked to their cognitive capacities. Finally, we link this analysis with a basic but often overlooked fact: human cognition is likely limited by our own brain structure. However, this limitation does not apply to machine learning systems, and we should be aware of the need to learn how to exploit this augmented vision of the nature.
Lawma: The Power of Specialization for Legal Tasks
Authors: Ricardo Dominguez-Olmedo, Vedant Nanda, Rediet Abebe, Stefan Bechtold, Christoph Engel, Jens Frankenreiter, Krishna Gummadi, Moritz Hardt, Michael Livermore
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, text-classification, Text Classification

Annotation and classification of legal text are central components of empirical legal research. Traditionally, these tasks are often delegated to trained research assistants. Motivated by the advances in language modeling, empirical legal scholars are increasingly turning to prompting commercial models, hoping that it will alleviate the significant cost of human annotation. Despite growing use, our understanding of how to best utilize large language models for legal tasks remains limited. We conduct a comprehensive study of 260 legal text classification tasks, nearly all new to the machine learning community. Starting from GPT-4 as a baseline, we show that it has non-trivial but highly varied zero-shot accuracy, often exhibiting performance that may be insufficient for legal work. We then demonstrate that a lightly fine-tuned Llama 3 model vastly outperforms GPT-4 on almost all tasks, typically by double-digit percentage points. We find that larger models respond better to fine-tuning than smaller models. A few tens to hundreds of examples suffice to achieve high classification accuracy. Notably, we can fine-tune a single model on all 260 tasks simultaneously at a small loss in accuracy relative to having a separate model for each task. Our work points to a viable alternative to the predominant practice of prompting commercial models. For concrete legal tasks with some available labeled data, researchers are better off using a fine-tuned open-source model.
No-brainer: Morphological Computation driven Adaptive Behavior in Soft Robots
Authors: Alican Mertan, Nick Cheney
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00

It is prevalent in contemporary AI and robotics to separately postulate a brain modeled by neural networks and employ it to learn intelligent and adaptive behavior. While this method has worked very well for many types of tasks, it isn't the only type of intelligence that exists in nature. In this work, we study the ways in which intelligent behavior can be created without a separate and explicit brain for robot control, but rather solely as a result of the computation occurring within the physical body of a robot. Specifically, we show that adaptive and complex behavior can be created in voxel-based virtual soft robots by using simple reactive materials that actively change the shape of the robot, and thus its behavior, under different environmental cues. We demonstrate a proof of concept for the idea of closed-loop morphological computation, and show that in our implementation, it enables behavior mimicking logic gates, enabling us to demonstrate how such behaviors may be combined to build up more complex collective behaviors.
Local vs Global continual learning
Authors: Giulia Lanzillotta, Sidak Pal Singh, Benjamin F. Grewe, Thomas Hofmann
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

Continual learning is the problem of integrating new information in a model while retaining the knowledge acquired in the past. Despite the tangible improvements achieved in recent years, the problem of continual learning is still an open one. A better understanding of the mechanisms behind the successes and failures of existing continual learning algorithms can unlock the development of new successful strategies. In this work, we view continual learning from the perspective of the multi-task loss approximation, and we compare two alternative strategies, namely local and global approximations. We classify existing continual learning algorithms based on the approximation used, and we assess the practical effects of this distinction in common continual learning settings.Additionally, we study optimal continual learning objectives in the case of local polynomial approximations and we provide examples of existing algorithms implementing the optimal objectives