pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Early Exit Strategies for Approximate k-NN Search in Dense Retrieval
Authors: Francesco Busolin, Claudio Lucchese, Franco Maria Nardini, Salvatore Orlando, Raffaele Perego, Salvatore Trani
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Learned dense representations are a popular family of techniques for encoding queries and documents using high-dimensional embeddings, which enable retrieval by performing approximate k nearest-neighbors search (A-kNN). A popular technique for making A-kNN search efficient is based on a two-level index, where the embeddings of documents are clustered offline and, at query processing, a fixed number N of clusters closest to the query is visited exhaustively to compute the result set. In this paper, we build upon state-of-the-art for early exit A-kNN and propose an unsupervised method based on the notion of patience, which can reach competitive effectiveness with large efficiency gains. Moreover, we discuss a cascade approach where we first identify queries that find their nearest neighbor within the closest t << N clusters, and then we decide how many more to visit based on our patience approach or other state-of-the-art strategies. Reproducible experiments employing state-of-the-art dense retrieval models and publicly available resources show that our techniques improve the A-kNN efficiency with up to 5x speedups while achieving negligible effectiveness losses. All the code used is available at https://github.com/francescobusolin/faiss_pEE
Relevance Filtering for Embedding-based Retrieval
Authors: Nicholas Rossi, Juexin Lin, Feng Liu, Zhen Yang, Tony Lee, Alessandro Magnani, Ciya Liao
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

In embedding-based retrieval, Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search enables efficient retrieval of similar items from large-scale datasets. While maximizing recall of relevant items is usually the goal of retrieval systems, a low precision may lead to a poor search experience. Unlike lexical retrieval, which inherently limits the size of the retrieved set through keyword matching, dense retrieval via ANN search has no natural cutoff. Moreover, the cosine similarity scores of embedding vectors are often optimized via contrastive or ranking losses, which make them difficult to interpret. Consequently, relying on top-K or cosine-similarity cutoff is often insufficient to filter out irrelevant results effectively. This issue is prominent in product search, where the number of relevant products is often small. This paper introduces a novel relevance filtering component (called "Cosine Adapter") for embedding-based retrieval to address this challenge. Our approach maps raw cosine similarity scores to interpretable scores using a query-dependent mapping function. We then apply a global threshold on the mapped scores to filter out irrelevant results. We are able to significantly increase the precision of the retrieved set, at the expense of a small loss of recall. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated through experiments on both public MS MARCO dataset and internal Walmart product search data. Furthermore, online A/B testing on the Walmart site validates the practical value of our approach in real-world e-commerce settings.
Enhancing Relevance of Embedding-based Retrieval at Walmart
Authors: Juexin Lin, Sachin Yadav, Feng Liu, Nicholas Rossi, Praveen R. Suram, Satya Chembolu, Prijith Chandran, Hrushikesh Mohapatra, Tony Lee, Alessandro Magnani, Ciya Liao
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Reranking, Retrieval, Semantic Retrieval

Embedding-based neural retrieval (EBR) is an effective search retrieval method in product search for tackling the vocabulary gap between customer search queries and products. The initial launch of our EBR system at Walmart yielded significant gains in relevance and add-to-cart rates [1]. However, despite EBR generally retrieving more relevant products for reranking, we have observed numerous instances of relevance degradation. Enhancing retrieval performance is crucial, as it directly influences product reranking and affects the customer shopping experience. Factors contributing to these degradations include false positives/negatives in the training data and the inability to handle query misspellings. To address these issues, we present several approaches to further strengthen the capabilities of our EBR model in terms of retrieval relevance. We introduce a Relevance Reward Model (RRM) based on human relevance feedback. We utilize RRM to remove noise from the training data and distill it into our EBR model through a multi-objective loss. In addition, we present the techniques to increase the performance of our EBR model, such as typo-aware training, and semi-positive generation. The effectiveness of our EBR is demonstrated through offline relevance evaluation, online AB tests, and successful deployments to live production. [1] Alessandro Magnani, Feng Liu, Suthee Chaidaroon, Sachin Yadav, Praveen Reddy Suram, Ajit Puthenputhussery, Sijie Chen, Min Xie, Anirudh Kashi, Tony Lee, et al. 2022. Semantic retrieval at walmart. In Proceedings of the 28th ACM SIGKDD Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining. 3495-3503.
3DLNews: A Three-decade Dataset of US Local News Articles
Authors: Gangani Ariyarathne, Alexander C. Nwala
Date: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

We present 3DLNews, a novel dataset with local news articles from the United States spanning the period from 1996 to 2024. It contains almost 1 million URLs (with HTML text) from over 14,000 local newspapers, TV, and radio stations across all 50 states, and provides a broad snapshot of the US local news landscape. The dataset was collected by scraping Google and Twitter search results. We employed a multi-step filtering process to remove non-news article links and enriched the dataset with metadata such as the names and geo-coordinates of the source news media organizations, article publication dates, etc. Furthermore, we demonstrated the utility of 3DLNews by outlining four applications.
Towards Semantic Markup of Mathematical Documents via User Interaction
Authors: Luka Vrečar, Joe Wells, Fairouz Kamareddine
Date: 2024-08-05 00:00:00

Mathematical documents written in LaTeX often contain ambiguities. We can resolve some of them via semantic markup using, e.g., sTeX, which also has other potential benefits, such as interoperability with computer algebra systems, proof systems, and increased accessibility. However, semantic markup is more involved than "regular" typesetting and presents a challenge for authors of mathematical documents. We aim to smooth out the transition from plain LaTeX to semantic markup by developing semi-automatic tools for authors. In this paper we present an approach to semantic markup of formulas by (semi-)automatically generating grammars from existing sTeX macro definitions and parsing mathematical formulas with them. We also present a GUI-based tool for the disambiguation of parse results and showcase its functionality and potential using a grammar for parsing untyped $\lambda$-terms.
PLUGH: A Benchmark for Spatial Understanding and Reasoning in Large Language Models
Authors: Alexey Tikhonov
Date: 2024-08-03 00:00:00

We present PLUGH (https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=plugh), a modern benchmark that currently consists of 5 tasks, each with 125 input texts extracted from 48 different games and representing 61 different (non-isomorphic) spatial graphs to assess the abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) for spatial understanding and reasoning. Our evaluation of API-based and open-sourced LLMs shows that while some commercial LLMs exhibit strong reasoning abilities, open-sourced competitors can demonstrate almost the same level of quality; however, all models still have significant room for improvement. We identify typical reasons for LLM failures and discuss possible ways to deal with them. Datasets and evaluation code are released (https://github.com/altsoph/PLUGH).
Abstractive summarization from Audio Transcription
Authors: Ilia Derkach
Date: 2024-07-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Quantization

Currently, large language models are gaining popularity, their achievements are used in many areas, ranging from text translation to generating answers to queries. However, the main problem with these new machine learning algorithms is that training such models requires large computing resources that only large IT companies have. To avoid this problem, a number of methods (LoRA, quantization) have been proposed so that existing models can be effectively fine-tuned for specific tasks. In this paper, we propose an E2E (end to end) audio summarization model using these techniques. In addition, this paper examines the effectiveness of these approaches to the problem under consideration and draws conclusions about the applicability of these methods.
Coexistence via trophic cascade in plant-herbivore-carnivore systems under intense predation pressure
Authors: Mozzamil Mohammed, Mohammed AY Mohammed, Abdallah Alsammani, Mohamed Bakheet, Cang Hui, Pietro Landi
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00

Carnivores interact with herbivores to indirectly impact plant populations, creating trophic cascades within plant-herbivore-carnivore systems. We developed and analyzed a food chain model to gain a mechanistic understanding of the critical roles carnivores play in ecosystems where plants face intense herbivory. Our model incorporates key factors such as seed production rates, seed germination probabilities, local plant interactions, herbivory rates, and carnivore predation rates. In the absence of carnivores, herbivores significantly reduce plant densities, often driving plants to extinction under high herbivory rates. However, the presence of carnivores suppresses herbivore populations, allowing plants to recover from herbivore pressure. We found that plant densities increase with carnivore predation rates, highlighting top-down effects and underscoring the importance of conserving carnivores in ecosystems where plants are at high risk of extinction from herbivory. Our results also show that carnivore density increases with seed-production rates, while herbivore density remains constant, indicating that plants benefit carnivores more than herbivores. This increase in carnivore density driven by high seed-production rates reflects bottom-up effects in the system. Overall, our study demonstrates that plants, herbivores, and carnivores can coexist even under intense predation stress. It suggests that carnivores play a crucial role in regulating plant and herbivore populations, with significant potential for maintaining biodiversity within ecosystems.
Nutrispace: A novel color space to enhance deep learning based early detection of cucurbits nutritional deficiency
Authors: Nabil Anan Orka, Ehtashamul Haque, M Nazim Uddin, Tofael Ahamed
Date: 2024-07-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: Computers and Electronics in Agriculture 2024 7
Tasks: Diagnostic, Image Classification

Early detection of plant nutritional deficiencies, followed by prompt corrective measures, is crucial for maintaining crop yield and produce quality. However, detecting these early signs in plant leaves often proves challenging, even with computer-aided diagnostic tools, because of their subtlety. As a solution, this study introduces Nutrispace, a new color space that enhances deep learning-based nutritional stress recognition by accentuating early signs of nutritional deficiency in leaf images. In this study, we evaluated Nutrispace’s efficacy by comparing its performance to RGB, HSV, and CIELAB using three lightweight classifiers: EfficientNetB0, MobileNetV2, and DenseNet121. To better understand Nutrispace’s effective range, we tested these classifiers with four image input sizes: 32 × 32, 64 × 64, 128 × 128, and 256 × 256. Our test dataset comprised images of ash gourd (Benincasa hispida), bitter gourd (Momordica charantia), and snake gourd (Trichosanthes cucumerina) leaves with early nitrogen and potassium deficiencies, as well as healthy controls. Our findings show that Nutrispace consistently improved accuracy across all 12 test cases, with improvements ranging from 1% to more than 8% compared to RGB. The performance improvement was more significant for higher-resolution cases, with Nutrispace achieving the maximum test accuracy of 90.62% on 256 × 256 images. Overall, Nutrispace performed effectively, irrespective of classifier structure and input size
OLID I: an open leaf image dataset for plant stress recognition
Authors: Nabil Anan Orka, M. Nazim Uddin, Fardeen Md. Toushique, Shahadath Hossain
Date: 2023-09-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: Frontiers in Plant Science 2023 9
Tasks: Image Classification

N/A
Depth Linear Discriminant Analysis
Authors: Abdullah B. Nassera, Waheed Ali H.M. Ghanem, Abdul-Malik H.Y. Saad, Antar Shaddad Hamed Abdul-Qawy, Sanaa A.A. Ghaleb, Nayef Abdulwahab Mohammed Alduais, Fakhrud Din, Mohamed Ghetas
Date: 2024-08-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: Expert Systems with Applications 2024 8

This study introduces a novel linear discriminant method, called Depth Linear Discriminant Analysis (D-LDA) to enhance the robustness of the original LDA. D-LDA systematically integrates the matrix depth concept into LDA, offering a systematic approach to address the challenges associated with scatter matrix estimation. As matrix depth measures how central or deep a particular matrix is within a distribution with respect to different directions, it is an efficient tool for computing a robust scatter matrix estimator that can handle outliers and complex data structures. The experimental results showed that the capacity of D-LDA to reduce data dimensionality and increase class separation yields highly competitive results compared to other LDAs.
Depth linear discrimination-oriented feature selection method based on adaptive sine cosine algorithm for software defect prediction
Authors: Abdullah B. Nasser, Waheed Ali H.M. Ghanem, Abdul-Malik H.Y. Saad, Antar Shaddad Hamed Abdul-Qawy, Sanaa A.A. Ghaleb, Nayef Abdulwahab Mohammed Alduais, Fakhrud Din, Mohamed Ghetas
Date: 2024-05-20 00:00:00
Proceeding: Expert Systems with Applications 2024 5
Tasks: feature selection

Software Defect Prediction (SDP) plays a vital role in the software development life cycle as it helps identify and fix software defects. However, predicting software defects with irrelevant features and overlapping classes is challenging and can lead to lengthy training and low model accuracy. To address these challenges, this research introduces a novel Depth Linear Discrimination-Oriented Feature Selection Method based on Adaptive Sine Cosine Algorithm, named Depth Adaptive Sine Cosine Feature Selection (DASC-FS). DASC-FS integrates the Adaptive Sine Cosine Algorithm (ASCA) as a search algorithm to determine the relevant features and adopts Depth Linear Discriminant Analysis (D-LDA) to identify the discriminative features that maximize class separation. The paper proposes ASCA which is a metaheuristic algorithm meticulously designed to enhance the search capabilities of the standard Sine Cosine Algorithm (SCA). Combining the simplicity of the SCA with the efficiency of multiple mutation operators inspired by Genetic Algorithms (GA), ASCA enhances the diversity of the solutions and imparts remarkable adaptability to various situations. Furthermore, this study introduces a novel linear discriminant method, called Depth Linear Discriminant Analysis (D-LDA) to enhance the robustness of the original LDA. D-LDA systematically integrates the matrix depth concept into LDA, offering a systematic approach to address the challenges associated with scatter matrix estimation. As matrix depth measures how central or deep a particular matrix is within a distribution with respect to different directions, it is an efficient tool for computing a robust scatter matrix estimator that can handle outliers and complex data structures. The experimental results showed that DASC-FS consistently obtains the highest accuracy compared to most existing methods by integrating ASCA and D-LDA, thereby considering both accuracy optimization and class separation. The results also show that the use of multiple mutation operators in ASCA improves the search process capabilities. The results also show that the capacity of D-LDA to reduce data dimensionality and increase class separation yields highly competitive results compared to other LDAs. Finally, features related to code size and complexity have emerged as key factors for SDP because they consistently rank as important features across different classifiers and datasets. DASC-FS offers a valuable solution in domain knowledge for enhancing predictive accuracy and understanding factors contributing to software defects through enhanced search capabilities, robust scatter matrix estimation, and the ability to reduce data dimensionality.
ConvKGYarn: Spinning Configurable and Scalable Conversational Knowledge Graph QA datasets with Large Language Models
Authors: Ronak Pradeep, Daniel Lee, Ali Mousavi, Jeff Pound, Yisi Sang, Jimmy Lin, Ihab Ilyas, Saloni Potdar, Mostafa Arefiyan, Yunyao Li
Date: 2024-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) and conversational assistants necessitates dynamic, scalable, and configurable conversational datasets for training and evaluation. These datasets must accommodate diverse user interaction modes, including text and voice, each presenting unique modeling challenges. Knowledge Graphs (KGs), with their structured and evolving nature, offer an ideal foundation for current and precise knowledge. Although human-curated KG-based conversational datasets exist, they struggle to keep pace with the rapidly changing user information needs. We present ConvKGYarn, a scalable method for generating up-to-date and configurable conversational KGQA datasets. Qualitative psychometric analyses confirm our method can generate high-quality datasets rivaling a popular conversational KGQA dataset while offering it at scale and covering a wide range of human-interaction configurations. We showcase its utility by testing LLMs on diverse conversations - exploring model behavior on conversational KGQA sets with different configurations grounded in the same KG fact set. Our results highlight the ability of ConvKGYarn to improve KGQA foundations and evaluate parametric knowledge of LLMs, thus offering a robust solution to the constantly evolving landscape of conversational assistants.
DUNE: A Machine Learning Deep UNet++ based Ensemble Approach to Monthly, Seasonal and Annual Climate Forecasting
Authors: Pratik Shukla, Milton Halem
Date: 2024-08-12 00:00:00

Capitalizing on the recent availability of ERA5 monthly averaged long-term data records of mean atmospheric and climate fields based on high-resolution reanalysis, deep-learning architectures offer an alternative to physics-based daily numerical weather predictions for subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) and annual means. A novel Deep UNet++-based Ensemble (DUNE) neural architecture is introduced, employing multi-encoder-decoder structures with residual blocks. When initialized from a prior month or year, this architecture produced the first AI-based global monthly, seasonal, or annual mean forecast of 2-meter temperatures (T2m) and sea surface temperatures (SST). ERA5 monthly mean data is used as input for T2m over land, SST over oceans, and solar radiation at the top of the atmosphere for each month of 40 years to train the model. Validation forecasts are performed for an additional two years, followed by five years of forecast evaluations to account for natural annual variability. AI-trained inference forecast weights generate forecasts in seconds, enabling ensemble seasonal forecasts. Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE), Anomaly Correlation Coefficient (ACC), and Heidke Skill Score (HSS) statistics are presented globally and over specific regions. These forecasts outperform persistence, climatology, and multiple linear regression for all domains. DUNE forecasts demonstrate comparable statistical accuracy to NOAA's operational monthly and seasonal probabilistic outlook forecasts over the US but at significantly higher resolutions. RMSE and ACC error statistics for other recent AI-based daily forecasts also show superior performance for DUNE-based forecasts. The DUNE model's application to an ensemble data assimilation cycle shows comparable forecast accuracy with a single high-resolution model, potentially eliminating the need for retraining on extrapolated datasets.
RISurConv: Rotation Invariant Surface Attention-Augmented Convolutions for 3D Point Cloud Classification and Segmentation
Authors: Zhiyuan Zhang, Licheng Yang, Zhiyu Xiang
Date: 2024-08-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Point Cloud Classification, Point Cloud Classification

Despite the progress on 3D point cloud deep learning, most prior works focus on learning features that are invariant to translation and point permutation, and very limited efforts have been devoted for rotation invariant property. Several recent studies achieve rotation invariance at the cost of lower accuracies. In this work, we close this gap by proposing a novel yet effective rotation invariant architecture for 3D point cloud classification and segmentation. Instead of traditional pointwise operations, we construct local triangle surfaces to capture more detailed surface structure, based on which we can extract highly expressive rotation invariant surface properties which are then integrated into an attention-augmented convolution operator named RISurConv to generate refined attention features via self-attention layers. Based on RISurConv we build an effective neural network for 3D point cloud analysis that is invariant to arbitrary rotations while maintaining high accuracy. We verify the performance on various benchmarks with supreme results obtained surpassing the previous state-of-the-art by a large margin. We achieve an overall accuracy of 96.0% (+4.7%) on ModelNet40, 93.1% (+12.8%) on ScanObjectNN, and class accuracies of 91.5% (+3.6%), 82.7% (+5.1%), and 78.5% (+9.2%) on the three categories of the FG3D dataset for the fine-grained classification task. Additionally, we achieve 81.5% (+1.0%) mIoU on ShapeNet for the segmentation task. Code is available here: https://github.com/cszyzhang/RISurConv
LumiGauss: Relightable Gaussian Splatting in the Wild
Authors: Joanna Kaleta, Kacper Kania, Tomasz Trzcinski, Marek Kowalski
Date: 2024-08-06 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, NeRF

Decoupling lighting from geometry using unconstrained photo collections is notoriously challenging. Solving it would benefit many users as creating complex 3D assets takes days of manual labor. Many previous works have attempted to address this issue, often at the expense of output fidelity, which questions the practicality of such methods. We introduce LumiGauss - a technique that tackles 3D reconstruction of scenes and environmental lighting through 2D Gaussian Splatting. Our approach yields high-quality scene reconstructions and enables realistic lighting synthesis under novel environment maps. We also propose a method for enhancing the quality of shadows, common in outdoor scenes, by exploiting spherical harmonics properties. Our approach facilitates seamless integration with game engines and enables the use of fast precomputed radiance transfer. We validate our method on the NeRF-OSR dataset, demonstrating superior performance over baseline methods. Moreover, LumiGauss can synthesize realistic images for unseen environment maps. Our code: https://github.com/joaxkal/lumigauss.