pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Boundary Matters: A Bi-Level Active Finetuning Framework
Authors: Han Lu, Yichen Xie, Xiaokang Yang, Junchi Yan
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Denoising, Diversity

The pretraining-finetuning paradigm has gained widespread adoption in vision tasks and other fields, yet it faces the significant challenge of high sample annotation costs. To mitigate this, the concept of active finetuning has emerged, aiming to select the most appropriate samples for model finetuning within a limited budget. Traditional active learning methods often struggle in this setting due to their inherent bias in batch selection. Furthermore, the recent active finetuning approach has primarily concentrated on aligning the distribution of selected subsets with the overall data pool, focusing solely on diversity. In this paper, we propose a Bi-Level Active Finetuning framework to select the samples for annotation in one shot, which includes two stages: core sample selection for diversity, and boundary sample selection for uncertainty. The process begins with the identification of pseudo-class centers, followed by an innovative denoising method and an iterative strategy for boundary sample selection in the high-dimensional feature space, all without relying on ground-truth labels. Our comprehensive experiments provide both qualitative and quantitative evidence of our method's efficacy, outperforming all the existing baselines.
Unified Projection-Free Algorithms for Adversarial DR-Submodular Optimization
Authors: Mohammad Pedramfar, Yididiya Y. Nadew, Christopher J. Quinn, Vaneet Aggarwal
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00

This paper introduces unified projection-free Frank-Wolfe type algorithms for adversarial continuous DR-submodular optimization, spanning scenarios such as full information and (semi-)bandit feedback, monotone and non-monotone functions, different constraints, and types of stochastic queries. For every problem considered in the non-monotone setting, the proposed algorithms are either the first with proven sub-linear $\alpha$-regret bounds or have better $\alpha$-regret bounds than the state of the art, where $\alpha$ is a corresponding approximation bound in the offline setting. In the monotone setting, the proposed approach gives state-of-the-art sub-linear $\alpha$-regret bounds among projection-free algorithms in 7 of the 8 considered cases while matching the result of the remaining case. Additionally, this paper addresses semi-bandit and bandit feedback for adversarial DR-submodular optimization, advancing the understanding of this optimization area.
Don't Half-listen: Capturing Key-part Information in Continual Instruction Tuning
Authors: Yongquan He, Wenyuan Zhang, Xuancheng Huang, Peng Zhang
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following

Instruction tuning for large language models (LLMs) can drive them to produce results consistent with human goals in specific downstream tasks. However, the process of continual instruction tuning (CIT) for LLMs may bring about the catastrophic forgetting (CF) problem, where previously learned abilities are degraded. Recent methods try to alleviate the CF problem by modifying models or replaying data, which may only remember the surface-level pattern of instructions and get confused on held-out tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel continual instruction tuning method based on Key-part Information Gain (KPIG). Our method computes the information gain on masked parts to dynamically replay data and refine the training objective, which enables LLMs to capture task-aware information relevant to the correct response and alleviate overfitting to general descriptions in instructions. In addition, we propose two metrics, P-score and V-score, to measure the generalization and instruction-following abilities of LLMs. Experiments demonstrate our method achieves superior performance on both seen and held-out tasks.
PPM : A Pre-trained Plug-in Model for Click-through Rate Prediction
Authors: Yuanbo Gao, Peng Lin, Dongyue Wang, Feng Mei, Xiwei Zhao, Sulong Xu, Jinghe Hu
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Recommendation Systems

Click-through rate (CTR) prediction is a core task in recommender systems. Existing methods (IDRec for short) rely on unique identities to represent distinct users and items that have prevailed for decades. On one hand, IDRec often faces significant performance degradation on cold-start problem; on the other hand, IDRec cannot use longer training data due to constraints imposed by iteration efficiency. Most prior studies alleviate the above problems by introducing pre-trained knowledge(e.g. pre-trained user model or multi-modal embeddings). However, the explosive growth of online latency can be attributed to the huge parameters in the pre-trained model. Therefore, most of them cannot employ the unified model of end-to-end training with IDRec in industrial recommender systems, thus limiting the potential of the pre-trained model. To this end, we propose a $\textbf{P}$re-trained $\textbf{P}$lug-in CTR $\textbf{M}$odel, namely PPM. PPM employs multi-modal features as input and utilizes large-scale data for pre-training. Then, PPM is plugged in IDRec model to enhance unified model's performance and iteration efficiency. Upon incorporating IDRec model, certain intermediate results within the network are cached, with only a subset of the parameters participating in training and serving. Hence, our approach can successfully deploy an end-to-end model without causing huge latency increases. Comprehensive offline experiments and online A/B testing at JD E-commerce demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of PPM.
Towards Embedding Dynamic Personas in Interactive Robots: Masquerading Animated Social Kinematics (MASK)
Authors: Jeongeun Park, Taemoon Jeong, Hyeonseong Kim, Taehyun Byun, Seungyoon Shin, Keunjun Choi, Jaewoon Kwon, Taeyoon Lee, Matthew Pan, Sungjoon Choi
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00

This paper presents the design and development of an innovative interactive robotic system to enhance audience engagement using character-like personas. Built upon the foundations of persona-driven dialog agents, this work extends the agent's application to the physical realm, employing robots to provide a more captivating and interactive experience. The proposed system, named the Masquerading Animated Social Kinematic (MASK), leverages an anthropomorphic robot which interacts with guests using non-verbal interactions, including facial expressions and gestures. A behavior generation system based upon a finite-state machine structure effectively conditions robotic behavior to convey distinct personas. The MASK framework integrates a perception engine, a behavior selection engine, and a comprehensive action library to enable real-time, dynamic interactions with minimal human intervention in behavior design. Throughout the user subject studies, we examined whether the users could recognize the intended character in both personality- and film-character-based persona conditions. We conclude by discussing the role of personas in interactive agents and the factors to consider for creating an engaging user experience.
Motion-Boundary-Driven Unsupervised Surgical Instrument Segmentation in Low-Quality Optical Flow
Authors: Yang Liu, Peiran Wu, Jiayu Huo, Gongyu Zhang, Zhen Yuan, Christos Bergeles, Rachel Sparks, Prokar Dasgupta, Alejandro Granados, Sebastien Ourselin
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Flow Estimation, Segmentation

Unsupervised video-based surgical instrument segmentation has the potential to accelerate the adoption of robot-assisted procedures by reducing the reliance on manual annotations. However, the generally low quality of optical flow in endoscopic footage poses a great challenge for unsupervised methods that rely heavily on motion cues. To overcome this limitation, we propose a novel approach that pinpoints motion boundaries, regions with abrupt flow changes, while selectively discarding frames with globally low-quality flow and adapting to varying motion patterns. Experiments on the EndoVis2017 VOS and EndoVis2017 Challenge datasets show that our method achieves mean Intersection-over-Union (mIoU) scores of 0.75 and 0.72, respectively, effectively alleviating the constraints imposed by suboptimal optical flow. This enables a more scalable and robust surgical instrument segmentation solution in clinical settings. The code will be publicly released.
MR-MT3: Memory Retaining Multi-Track Music Transcription to Mitigate Instrument Leakage
Authors: Hao Hao Tan, Kin Wai Cheuk, Taemin Cho, Wei-Hsiang Liao, Yuki Mitsufuji
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Transcription

This paper presents enhancements to the MT3 model, a state-of-the-art (SOTA) token-based multi-instrument automatic music transcription (AMT) model. Despite SOTA performance, MT3 has the issue of instrument leakage, where transcriptions are fragmented across different instruments. To mitigate this, we propose MR-MT3, with enhancements including a memory retention mechanism, prior token sampling, and token shuffling are proposed. These methods are evaluated on the Slakh2100 dataset, demonstrating improved onset F1 scores and reduced instrument leakage. In addition to the conventional multi-instrument transcription F1 score, new metrics such as the instrument leakage ratio and the instrument detection F1 score are introduced for a more comprehensive assessment of transcription quality. The study also explores the issue of domain overfitting by evaluating MT3 on single-instrument monophonic datasets such as ComMU and NSynth. The findings, along with the source code, are shared to facilitate future work aimed at refining token-based multi-instrument AMT models.
FBPT: A Fully Binary Point Transformer
Authors: Zhixing Hou, Yuzhang Shang, Yan Yan
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Binarization, Point Cloud Classification

This paper presents a novel Fully Binary Point Cloud Transformer (FBPT) model which has the potential to be widely applied and expanded in the fields of robotics and mobile devices. By compressing the weights and activations of a 32-bit full-precision network to 1-bit binary values, the proposed binary point cloud Transformer network significantly reduces the storage footprint and computational resource requirements of neural network models for point cloud processing tasks, compared to full-precision point cloud networks. However, achieving a fully binary point cloud Transformer network, where all parts except the modules specific to the task are binary, poses challenges and bottlenecks in quantizing the activations of Q, K, V and self-attention in the attention module, as they do not adhere to simple probability distributions and can vary with input data. Furthermore, in our network, the binary attention module undergoes a degradation of the self-attention module due to the uniform distribution that occurs after the softmax operation. The primary focus of this paper is on addressing the performance degradation issue caused by the use of binary point cloud Transformer modules. We propose a novel binarization mechanism called dynamic-static hybridization. Specifically, our approach combines static binarization of the overall network model with fine granularity dynamic binarization of data-sensitive components. Furthermore, we make use of a novel hierarchical training scheme to obtain the optimal model and binarization parameters. These above improvements allow the proposed binarization method to outperform binarization methods applied to convolution neural networks when used in point cloud Transformer structures. To demonstrate the superiority of our algorithm, we conducted experiments on two different tasks: point cloud classification and place recognition.
EfficientVMamba: Atrous Selective Scan for Light Weight Visual Mamba
Authors: Xiaohuan Pei, Tao Huang, Chang Xu
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Mamba, State Space Models

Prior efforts in light-weight model development mainly centered on CNN and Transformer-based designs yet faced persistent challenges. CNNs adept at local feature extraction compromise resolution while Transformers offer global reach but escalate computational demands $\mathcal{O}(N^2)$. This ongoing trade-off between accuracy and efficiency remains a significant hurdle. Recently, state space models (SSMs), such as Mamba, have shown outstanding performance and competitiveness in various tasks such as language modeling and computer vision, while reducing the time complexity of global information extraction to $\mathcal{O}(N)$. Inspired by this, this work proposes to explore the potential of visual state space models in light-weight model design and introduce a novel efficient model variant dubbed EfficientVMamba. Concretely, our EfficientVMamba integrates a atrous-based selective scan approach by efficient skip sampling, constituting building blocks designed to harness both global and local representational features. Additionally, we investigate the integration between SSM blocks and convolutions, and introduce an efficient visual state space block combined with an additional convolution branch, which further elevate the model performance. Experimental results show that, EfficientVMamba scales down the computational complexity while yields competitive results across a variety of vision tasks. For example, our EfficientVMamba-S with $1.3$G FLOPs improves Vim-Ti with $1.5$G FLOPs by a large margin of $5.6\%$ accuracy on ImageNet. Code is available at: \url{https://github.com/TerryPei/EfficientVMamba}.
Unlocking the Multi-modal Potential of CLIP for Generalized Category Discovery
Authors: Enguang Wang, Zhimao Peng, Zhengyuan Xie, Fei Yang, Xialei Liu, Ming-Ming Cheng
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00

Given unlabelled datasets containing both old and new categories, generalized category discovery (GCD) aims to accurately discover new classes while correctly classifying old classes, leveraging the class concepts learned from labeled samples. Current GCD methods only use a single visual modality of information, resulting in poor classification of visually similar classes. As a different modality, text information can provide complementary discriminative information, which motivates us to introduce it into the GCD task. However, the lack of class names for unlabelled data makes it impractical to utilize text information. To tackle this challenging problem, in this paper, we propose a Text Embedding Synthesizer (TES) to generate pseudo text embeddings for unlabelled samples. Specifically, our TES leverages the property that CLIP can generate aligned vision-language features, converting visual embeddings into tokens of the CLIP's text encoder to generate pseudo text embeddings. Besides, we employ a dual-branch framework, through the joint learning and instance consistency of different modality branches, visual and semantic information mutually enhance each other, promoting the interaction and fusion of visual and text knowledge. Our method unlocks the multi-modal potentials of CLIP and outperforms the baseline methods by a large margin on all GCD benchmarks, achieving new state-of-the-art. The code will be released at https://github.com/enguangW/GET .
Take Care of Your Prompt Bias! Investigating and Mitigating Prompt Bias in Factual Knowledge Extraction
Authors: Ziyang Xu, Keqin Peng, Liang Ding, DaCheng Tao, Xiliang Lu
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00

Recent research shows that pre-trained language models (PLMs) suffer from "prompt bias" in factual knowledge extraction, i.e., prompts tend to introduce biases toward specific labels. Prompt bias presents a significant challenge in assessing the factual knowledge within PLMs. Therefore, this paper aims to improve the reliability of existing benchmarks by thoroughly investigating and mitigating prompt bias. We show that: 1) all prompts in the experiments exhibit non-negligible bias, with gradient-based prompts like AutoPrompt and OptiPrompt displaying significantly higher levels of bias; 2) prompt bias can amplify benchmark accuracy unreasonably by overfitting the test datasets, especially on imbalanced datasets like LAMA. Based on these findings, we propose a representation-based approach to mitigate the prompt bias during inference time. Specifically, we first estimate the biased representation using prompt-only querying, and then remove it from the model's internal representations to generate the debiased representations, which are used to produce the final debiased outputs. Experiments across various prompts, PLMs, and benchmarks show that our approach can not only correct the overfitted performance caused by prompt bias, but also significantly improve the prompt retrieval capability (up to 10% absolute performance gain). These results indicate that our approach effectively alleviates prompt bias in knowledge evaluation, thereby enhancing the reliability of benchmark assessments. Hopefully, our plug-and-play approach can be a golden standard to strengthen PLMs toward reliable knowledge bases. Code and data are released in https://github.com/FelliYang/PromptBias.
Zero-shot Explainable Mental Health Analysis on Social Media by Incorporating Mental Scales
Authors: Wenyu Li, Yinuo Zhu, Xin Lin, Ming Li, Ziyue Jiang, Ziqian Zeng
Date: 2024-02-09 00:00:00

Traditional discriminative approaches in mental health analysis are known for their strong capacity but lack interpretability and demand large-scale annotated data. The generative approaches, such as those based on large language models (LLMs), have the potential to get rid of heavy annotations and provide explanations but their capabilities still fall short compared to discriminative approaches, and their explanations may be unreliable due to the fact that the generation of explanation is a black-box process. Inspired by the psychological assessment practice of using scales to evaluate mental states, our method which is called Mental Analysis by Incorporating Mental Scales (MAIMS), incorporates two procedures via LLMs. First, the patient completes mental scales, and second, the psychologist interprets the collected information from the mental scales and makes informed decisions. Experimental results show that MAIMS outperforms other zero-shot methods. MAIMS can generate more rigorous explanation based on the outputs of mental scales
RadCLIP: Enhancing Radiologic Image Analysis through Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training
Authors: Zhixiu Lu, Hailong Li, Nehal A. Parikh, Jonathan R. Dillman, Lili He
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, image-classification, Image Classification, Image-text matching, Text Matching

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) with radiology marks a transformative era in medicine. Vision foundation models have been adopted to enhance radiologic imaging analysis. However, the distinct complexities of radiologic 2D and 3D radiologic data pose unique challenges that existing models, pre-trained on general non-medical images, fail to address adequately. To bridge this gap and capitalize on the diagnostic precision required in radiologic imaging, we introduce Radiologic Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (RadCLIP): a cross-modal vision-language foundational model that harnesses Vision Language Pre-training (VLP) framework to improve radiologic image analysis. Building upon Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP), RadCLIP incorporates a slice pooling mechanism tailored for volumetric image analysis and is pre-trained using a large and diverse dataset of radiologic image-text pairs. The RadCLIP was pre-trained to effectively align radiologic images with their corresponding text annotations, creating a robust vision backbone for radiologic images. Extensive experiments demonstrate RadCLIP's superior performance in both uni-modal radiologic image classification and cross-modal image-text matching, highlighting its significant promise for improving diagnostic accuracy and efficiency in clinical settings. Our Key contributions include curating a large dataset with diverse radiologic 2D/3D radiologic image-text pairs, a slice pooling adapter using an attention mechanism for integrating 2D images, and comprehensive evaluations of RadCLIP on various radiologic downstream tasks.
Global Convergence Guarantees for Federated Policy Gradient Methods with Adversaries
Authors: Swetha Ganesh, Jiayu Chen, Gugan Thoppe, Vaneet Aggarwal
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Policy Gradient Methods

Federated Reinforcement Learning (FRL) allows multiple agents to collaboratively build a decision making policy without sharing raw trajectories. However, if a small fraction of these agents are adversarial, it can lead to catastrophic results. We propose a policy gradient based approach that is robust to adversarial agents which can send arbitrary values to the server. Under this setting, our results form the first global convergence guarantees with general parametrization. These results demonstrate resilience with adversaries, while achieving optimal sample complexity of order $\tilde{\mathcal{O}}\left( \frac{1}{N\epsilon^2} \left( 1+ \frac{f^2}{N}\right)\right)$, where $N$ is the total number of agents and $f<N/2$ is the number of adversarial agents.
Quality-Diversity Actor-Critic: Learning High-Performing and Diverse Behaviors via Value and Successor Features Critics
Authors: Luca Grillotti, Maxence Faldor, Borja G. León, Antoine Cully
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: continuous-control, Continuous Control, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Diversity, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

A key aspect of intelligence is the ability to demonstrate a broad spectrum of behaviors for adapting to unexpected situations. Over the past decade, advancements in deep reinforcement learning have led to groundbreaking achievements to solve complex continuous control tasks. However, most approaches return only one solution specialized for a specific problem. We introduce Quality-Diversity Actor-Critic (QDAC), an off-policy actor-critic deep reinforcement learning algorithm that leverages a value function critic and a successor features critic to learn high-performing and diverse behaviors. In this framework, the actor optimizes an objective that seamlessly unifies both critics using constrained optimization to (1) maximize return, while (2) executing diverse skills. Compared with other Quality-Diversity methods, QDAC achieves significantly higher performance and more diverse behaviors on six challenging continuous control locomotion tasks. We also demonstrate that we can harness the learned skills to adapt better than other baselines to five perturbed environments. Finally, qualitative analyses showcase a range of remarkable behaviors: adaptive-intelligent-robotics.github.io/QDAC.
Surrogate Assisted Monte Carlo Tree Search in Combinatorial Optimization
Authors: Saeid Amiri, Parisa Zehtabi, Danial Dervovic, Michael Cashmore
Date: 2024-03-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization

Industries frequently adjust their facilities network by opening new branches in promising areas and closing branches in areas where they expect low profits. In this paper, we examine a particular class of facility location problems. Our objective is to minimize the loss of sales resulting from the removal of several retail stores. However, estimating sales accurately is expensive and time-consuming. To overcome this challenge, we leverage Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) assisted by a surrogate model that computes evaluations faster. Results suggest that MCTS supported by a fast surrogate function can generate solutions faster while maintaining a consistent solution compared to MCTS that does not benefit from the surrogate function.