pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Motion-Oriented Compositional Neural Radiance Fields for Monocular Dynamic Human Modeling
Authors: Jaehyeok Kim, Dongyoon Wee, Dan Xu
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: NeRF

This paper introduces Motion-oriented Compositional Neural Radiance Fields (MoCo-NeRF), a framework designed to perform free-viewpoint rendering of monocular human videos via novel non-rigid motion modeling approach. In the context of dynamic clothed humans, complex cloth dynamics generate non-rigid motions that are intrinsically distinct from skeletal articulations and critically important for the rendering quality. The conventional approach models non-rigid motions as spatial (3D) deviations in addition to skeletal transformations. However, it is either time-consuming or challenging to achieve optimal quality due to its high learning complexity without a direct supervision. To target this problem, we propose a novel approach of modeling non-rigid motions as radiance residual fields to benefit from more direct color supervision in the rendering and utilize the rigid radiance fields as a prior to reduce the complexity of the learning process. Our approach utilizes a single multiresolution hash encoding (MHE) to concurrently learn the canonical T-pose representation from rigid skeletal motions and the radiance residual field for non-rigid motions. Additionally, to further improve both training efficiency and usability, we extend MoCo-NeRF to support simultaneous training of multiple subjects within a single framework, thanks to our effective design for modeling non-rigid motions. This scalability is achieved through the integration of a global MHE and learnable identity codes in addition to multiple local MHEs. We present extensive results on ZJU-MoCap and MonoCap, clearly demonstrating state-of-the-art performance in both single- and multi-subject settings. The code and model will be made publicly available at the project page: https://stevejaehyeok.github.io/publications/moco-nerf.
Rethinking Transformer-based Multi-document Summarization: An Empirical Investigation
Authors: Congbo Ma, Wei Emma Zhang, Dileepa Pitawela, Haojie Zhuang, Yanfeng Shu
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Document Summarization, Multi-Document Summarization, Sensitivity

The utilization of Transformer-based models prospers the growth of multi-document summarization (MDS). Given the huge impact and widespread adoption of Transformer-based models in various natural language processing tasks, investigating their performance and behaviors in the context of MDS becomes crucial for advancing the field and enhancing the quality of summary. To thoroughly examine the behaviours of Transformer-based MDS models, this paper presents five empirical studies on (1) measuring the impact of document boundary separators quantitatively; (2) exploring the effectiveness of different mainstream Transformer structures; (3) examining the sensitivity of the encoder and decoder; (4) discussing different training strategies; and (5) discovering the repetition in a summary generation. The experimental results on prevalent MDS datasets and eleven evaluation metrics show the influence of document boundary separators, the granularity of different level features and different model training strategies. The results also reveal that the decoder exhibits greater sensitivity to noises compared to the encoder. This underscores the important role played by the decoder, suggesting a potential direction for future research in MDS. Furthermore, the experimental results indicate that the repetition problem in the generated summaries has correlations with the high uncertainty scores.
Tackling Oversmoothing in GNN via Graph Sparsification: A Truss-based Approach
Authors: Tanvir Hossain, Khaled Mohammed Saifuddin, Muhammad Ifte Khairul Islam, Farhan Tanvir, Esra Akbas
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Classification, Graph Neural Network

Graph Neural Network (GNN) achieves great success for node-level and graph-level tasks via encoding meaningful topological structures of networks in various domains, ranging from social to biological networks. However, repeated aggregation operations lead to excessive mixing of node representations, particularly in dense regions with multiple GNN layers, resulting in nearly indistinguishable embeddings. This phenomenon leads to the oversmoothing problem that hampers downstream graph analytics tasks. To overcome this issue, we propose a novel and flexible truss-based graph sparsification model that prunes edges from dense regions of the graph. Pruning redundant edges in dense regions helps to prevent the aggregation of excessive neighborhood information during hierarchical message passing and pooling in GNN models. We then utilize our sparsification model in the state-of-the-art baseline GNNs and pooling models, such as GIN, SAGPool, GMT, DiffPool, MinCutPool, HGP-SL, DMonPool, and AdamGNN. Extensive experiments on different real-world datasets show that our model significantly improves the performance of the baseline GNN models in the graph classification task.
What's Wrong? Refining Meeting Summaries with LLM Feedback
Authors: Frederic Kirstein, Terry Ruas, Bela Gipp
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Informativeness, Meeting Summarization, Text Generation

Meeting summarization has become a critical task since digital encounters have become a common practice. Large language models (LLMs) show great potential in summarization, offering enhanced coherence and context understanding compared to traditional methods. However, they still struggle to maintain relevance and avoid hallucination. We introduce a multi-LLM correction approach for meeting summarization using a two-phase process that mimics the human review process: mistake identification and summary refinement. We release QMSum Mistake, a dataset of 200 automatically generated meeting summaries annotated by humans on nine error types, including structural, omission, and irrelevance errors. Our experiments show that these errors can be identified with high accuracy by an LLM. We transform identified mistakes into actionable feedback to improve the quality of a given summary measured by relevance, informativeness, conciseness, and coherence. This post-hoc refinement effectively improves summary quality by leveraging multiple LLMs to validate output quality. Our multi-LLM approach for meeting summarization shows potential for similar complex text generation tasks requiring robustness, action planning, and discussion towards a goal.
Imitation of human motion achieves natural head movements for humanoid robots in an active-speaker detection task
Authors: Bosong Ding, Murat Kirtay, Giacomo Spigler
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Speaker Detection

Head movements are crucial for social human-human interaction. They can transmit important cues (e.g., joint attention, speaker detection) that cannot be achieved with verbal interaction alone. This advantage also holds for human-robot interaction. Even though modeling human motions through generative AI models has become an active research area within robotics in recent years, the use of these methods for producing head movements in human-robot interaction remains underexplored. In this work, we employed a generative AI pipeline to produce human-like head movements for a Nao humanoid robot. In addition, we tested the system on a real-time active-speaker tracking task in a group conversation setting. Overall, the results show that the Nao robot successfully imitates human head movements in a natural manner while actively tracking the speakers during the conversation. Code and data from this study are available at https://github.com/dingdingding60/Humanoids2024HRI
Bridging Weighted First Order Model Counting and Graph Polynomials
Authors: Qipeng Kuang, Ondřej Kuželka, Yuanhong Wang, Yuyi Wang
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentence

The Weighted First-Order Model Counting Problem (WFOMC) asks to compute the weighted sum of models of a given first-order logic sentence over a given domain. It can be solved in time polynomial in the domain size for sentences from the two-variable fragment with counting quantifiers, known as $C^2$. This polynomial-time complexity is known to be retained when extending $C^2$ by one of the following axioms: linear order axiom, tree axiom, forest axiom, directed acyclic graph axiom or connectedness axiom. An interesting question remains as to which other axioms can be added to the first-order sentences in this way. We provide a new perspective on this problem by associating WFOMC with graph polynomials. Using WFOMC, we define Weak Connectedness Polynomial and Strong Connectedness Polynomials for first-order logic sentences. It turns out that these polynomials have the following interesting properties. First, they can be computed in polynomial time in the domain size for sentences from $C^2$. Second, we can use them to solve WFOMC with all of the existing axioms known to be tractable as well as with new ones such as bipartiteness, strong connectedness, having $k$ connected components, etc. Third, the well-known Tutte polynomial can be recovered as a special case of the Weak Connectedness Polynomial, and the Strict and Non-Strict Directed Chromatic Polynomials can be recovered from the Strong Connectedness Polynomials.
Zero-shot Cross-Lingual Transfer for Synthetic Data Generation in Grammatical Error Detection
Authors: Gaetan Lopez Latouche, Marc-André Carbonneau, Ben Swanson
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Cross-Lingual Transfer, Grammatical Error Detection, Synthetic Data Generation, Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

Grammatical Error Detection (GED) methods rely heavily on human annotated error corpora. However, these annotations are unavailable in many low-resource languages. In this paper, we investigate GED in this context. Leveraging the zero-shot cross-lingual transfer capabilities of multilingual pre-trained language models, we train a model using data from a diverse set of languages to generate synthetic errors in other languages. These synthetic error corpora are then used to train a GED model. Specifically we propose a two-stage fine-tuning pipeline where the GED model is first fine-tuned on multilingual synthetic data from target languages followed by fine-tuning on human-annotated GED corpora from source languages. This approach outperforms current state-of-the-art annotation-free GED methods. We also analyse the errors produced by our method and other strong baselines, finding that our approach produces errors that are more diverse and more similar to human errors.
Schema Matching with Large Language Models: an Experimental Study
Authors: Marcel Parciak, Brecht Vandevoort, Frank Neven, Liesbet M. Peeters, Stijn Vansummeren
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown useful applications in a variety of tasks, including data wrangling. In this paper, we investigate the use of an off-the-shelf LLM for schema matching. Our objective is to identify semantic correspondences between elements of two relational schemas using only names and descriptions. Using a newly created benchmark from the health domain, we propose different so-called task scopes. These are methods for prompting the LLM to do schema matching, which vary in the amount of context information contained in the prompt. Using these task scopes we compare LLM-based schema matching against a string similarity baseline, investigating matching quality, verification effort, decisiveness, and complementarity of the approaches. We find that matching quality suffers from a lack of context information, but also from providing too much context information. In general, using newer LLM versions increases decisiveness. We identify task scopes that have acceptable verification effort and succeed in identifying a significant number of true semantic matches. Our study shows that LLMs have potential in bootstrapping the schema matching process and are able to assist data engineers in speeding up this task solely based on schema element names and descriptions without the need for data instances.
Variational Randomized Smoothing for Sample-Wise Adversarial Robustness
Authors: Ryo Hase, Ye Wang, Toshiaki Koike-Akino, Jing Liu, Kieran Parsons
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

Randomized smoothing is a defensive technique to achieve enhanced robustness against adversarial examples which are small input perturbations that degrade the performance of neural network models. Conventional randomized smoothing adds random noise with a fixed noise level for every input sample to smooth out adversarial perturbations. This paper proposes a new variational framework that uses a per-sample noise level suitable for each input by introducing a noise level selector. Our experimental results demonstrate enhancement of empirical robustness against adversarial attacks. We also provide and analyze the certified robustness for our sample-wise smoothing method.
Preemptive Detection and Correction of Misaligned Actions in LLM Agents
Authors: Haishuo Fang, Xiaodan Zhu, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Detection, Decision Making

Deploying LLM-based agents in real-life applications often faces a critical challenge: the misalignment between agents' behavior and user intent. Such misalignment may lead agents to unintentionally execute critical actions that carry negative outcomes (e.g., accidentally triggering a "buy-now" in web shopping), resulting in undesirable or even irreversible consequences. Although addressing these issues is crucial, the preemptive detection and correction of misaligned actions remains relatively underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce InferAct, a novel approach that leverages the belief reasoning ability of LLMs, grounded in Theory-of-Mind, to detect misaligned actions before execution. Once the misalignment is detected, InferAct alerts users for timely correction, preventing adverse outcomes and enhancing the reliability of LLM agents' decision-making processes. Experiments on three widely used tasks demonstrate that InferAct achieves up to 20% improvements on Marco-F1 against baselines in misaligned action detection. An in-depth evaluation of misalignment correction further highlights InferAct's effectiveness in improving agent alignment.
zIA: a GenAI-powered local auntie assists tourists in Italy
Authors: Alexio Cassani, Michele Ruberl, Antonio Salis, Giacomo Giannese, Gianluca Boanelli
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Management

The Tourism and Destination Management Organization (DMO) industry is rapidly evolving to adapt to new technologies and traveler expectations. Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) offers an astonishing and innovative opportunity to enhance the tourism experience by providing personalized, interactive and engaging assistance. In this article, we propose a generative AI-based chatbot for tourism assistance. The chatbot leverages AI ability to generate realistic and creative texts, adopting the friendly persona of the well-known Italian all-knowledgeable aunties, to provide tourists with personalized information, tailored and dynamic pre, during and post recommendations and trip plans and personalized itineraries, using both text and voice commands, and supporting different languages to satisfy Italian and foreign tourists expectations. This work is under development in the Molise CTE research project, funded by the Italian Minister of the Economic Growth (MIMIT), with the aim to leverage the best emerging technologies available, such as Cloud and AI to produce state of the art solutions in the Smart City environment.
GPT Assisted Annotation of Rhetorical and Linguistic Features for Interpretable Propaganda Technique Detection in News Text
Authors: Kyle Hamilton, Luca Longo, Bojan Bozic
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Engineering, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

While the use of machine learning for the detection of propaganda techniques in text has garnered considerable attention, most approaches focus on "black-box" solutions with opaque inner workings. Interpretable approaches provide a solution, however, they depend on careful feature engineering and costly expert annotated data. Additionally, language features specific to propagandistic text are generally the focus of rhetoricians or linguists, and there is no data set labeled with such features suitable for machine learning. This study codifies 22 rhetorical and linguistic features identified in literature related to the language of persuasion for the purpose of annotating an existing data set labeled with propaganda techniques. To help human experts annotate natural language sentences with these features, RhetAnn, a web application, was specifically designed to minimize an otherwise considerable mental effort. Finally, a small set of annotated data was used to fine-tune GPT-3.5, a generative large language model (LLM), to annotate the remaining data while optimizing for financial cost and classification accuracy. This study demonstrates how combining a small number of human annotated examples with GPT can be an effective strategy for scaling the annotation process at a fraction of the cost of traditional annotation relying solely on human experts. The results are on par with the best performing model at the time of writing, namely GPT-4, at 10x less the cost. Our contribution is a set of features, their properties, definitions, and examples in a machine-readable format, along with the code for RhetAnn and the GPT prompts and fine-tuning procedures for advancing state-of-the-art interpretable propaganda technique detection.
The Future of Data Science Education
Authors: Brian Wright, Peter Alonzi, Ali Rivera
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

The definition of Data Science is a hotly debated topic. For many, the definition is a simple shortcut to Artificial Intelligence or Machine Learning. However, there is far more depth and nuance to the field of Data Science than a simple shortcut can provide. The School of Data Science at the University of Virginia has developed a novel model for the definition of Data Science. This model is based on identifying a unified understanding of the data work done across all areas of Data Science. It represents a generational leap forward in how we understand and teach Data Science. In this paper we will present the core features of the model and explain how it unifies various concepts going far beyond the analytics component of AI. From this foundation we will present our Undergraduate Major curriculum in Data Science and demonstrate how it prepares students to be well-rounded Data Science team members and leaders. The paper will conclude with an in-depth overview of the Foundations of Data Science course designed to introduce students to the field while also implementing proven STEM oriented pedagogical methods. These include, for example, specifications grading, active learning lectures, guest lectures from industry experts and weekly gamification labs.
Approximating Probabilistic Inference in Statistical EL with Knowledge Graph Embeddings
Authors: Yuqicheng Zhu, Nico Potyka, Bo Xiong, Trung-Kien Tran, Mojtaba Nayyeri, Evgeny Kharlamov, Steffen Staab
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Embeddings, valid

Statistical information is ubiquitous but drawing valid conclusions from it is prohibitively hard. We explain how knowledge graph embeddings can be used to approximate probabilistic inference efficiently using the example of Statistical EL (SEL), a statistical extension of the lightweight Description Logic EL. We provide proofs for runtime and soundness guarantees, and empirically evaluate the runtime and approximation quality of our approach.
Stepping Stones: A Progressive Training Strategy for Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Juncheng Ma, Peiwen Sun, Yaoting Wang, Di Hu
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, global-optimization, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Audio-Visual Segmentation (AVS) aims to achieve pixel-level localization of sound sources in videos, while Audio-Visual Semantic Segmentation (AVSS), as an extension of AVS, further pursues semantic understanding of audio-visual scenes. However, since the AVSS task requires the establishment of audio-visual correspondence and semantic understanding simultaneously, we observe that previous methods have struggled to handle this mashup of objectives in end-to-end training, resulting in insufficient learning and sub-optimization. Therefore, we propose a two-stage training strategy called \textit{Stepping Stones}, which decomposes the AVSS task into two simple subtasks from localization to semantic understanding, which are fully optimized in each stage to achieve step-by-step global optimization. This training strategy has also proved its generalization and effectiveness on existing methods. To further improve the performance of AVS tasks, we propose a novel framework Adaptive Audio Visual Segmentation, in which we incorporate an adaptive audio query generator and integrate masked attention into the transformer decoder, facilitating the adaptive fusion of visual and audio features. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our methods achieve state-of-the-art results on all three AVS benchmarks. The project homepage can be accessed at https://gewu-lab.github.io/stepping_stones/.
Discriminative and Consistent Representation Distillation
Authors: Nikolaos Giakoumoglou, Tania Stathaki
Date: 2024-07-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Contrastive Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Self-Supervised Learning

Knowledge Distillation (KD) aims to transfer knowledge from a large teacher model to a smaller student model. While contrastive learning has shown promise in self-supervised learning by creating discriminative representations, its application in knowledge distillation remains limited and focuses primarily on discrimination, neglecting the structural relationships captured by the teacher model. To address this limitation, we propose Discriminative and Consistent Distillation (DCD), which employs a contrastive loss along with a consistency regularization to minimize the discrepancy between the distributions of teacher and student representations. Our method introduces learnable temperature and bias parameters that adapt during training to balance these complementary objectives, replacing the fixed hyperparameters commonly used in contrastive learning approaches. Through extensive experiments on CIFAR-100 and ImageNet ILSVRC-2012, we demonstrate that DCD achieves state-of-the-art performance, with the student model sometimes surpassing the teacher's accuracy. Furthermore, we show that DCD's learned representations exhibit superior cross-dataset generalization when transferred to Tiny ImageNet and STL-10.