pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
COMFORT: A Continual Fine-Tuning Framework for Foundation Models Targeted at Consumer Healthcare
Authors: Chia-Hao Li, Niraj K. Jha
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Wearable medical sensors (WMSs) are revolutionizing smart healthcare by enabling continuous, real-time monitoring of user physiological signals, especially in the field of consumer healthcare. The integration of WMSs and modern machine learning (ML) enables unprecedented solutions to efficient early-stage disease detection. Despite the success of Transformers in various fields, their application to sensitive domains, such as smart healthcare, remains underexplored due to limited data accessibility and privacy concerns. To bridge the gap between Transformer-based foundation models and WMS-based disease detection, we propose COMFORT, a continual fine-tuning framework for foundation models targeted at consumer healthcare. COMFORT introduces a novel approach for pre-training a Transformer-based foundation model on a large dataset of physiological signals exclusively collected from healthy individuals with commercially available WMSs. We adopt a masked data modeling (MDM) objective to pre-train this health foundation model. We then fine-tune the model using various parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) methods, such as low-rank adaptation (LoRA) and its variants, to adapt it to various downstream disease detection tasks that rely on WMS data. In addition, COMFORT continually stores the low-rank decomposition matrices obtained from the PEFT algorithms to construct a library for multi-disease detection. The COMFORT library enables scalable and memory-efficient disease detection on edge devices. Our experimental results demonstrate that COMFORT achieves highly competitive performance while reducing memory overhead by up to 52% relative to conventional methods. Thus, COMFORT paves the way for personalized and proactive solutions to efficient and effective early-stage disease detection for consumer healthcare.
Autonomous Goal Detection and Cessation in Reinforcement Learning: A Case Study on Source Term Estimation
Authors: Yiwei Shi, Muning Wen, Qi Zhang, Weinan Zhang, Cunjia Liu, Weiru Liu
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Reinforcement Learning has revolutionized decision-making processes in dynamic environments, yet it often struggles with autonomously detecting and achieving goals without clear feedback signals. For example, in a Source Term Estimation problem, the lack of precise environmental information makes it challenging to provide clear feedback signals and to define and evaluate how the source's location is determined. To address this challenge, the Autonomous Goal Detection and Cessation (AGDC) module was developed, enhancing various RL algorithms by incorporating a self-feedback mechanism for autonomous goal detection and cessation upon task completion. Our method effectively identifies and ceases undefined goals by approximating the agent's belief, significantly enhancing the capabilities of RL algorithms in environments with limited feedback. To validate effectiveness of our approach, we integrated AGDC with deep Q-Network, proximal policy optimization, and deep deterministic policy gradient algorithms, and evaluated its performance on the Source Term Estimation problem. The experimental results showed that AGDC-enhanced RL algorithms significantly outperformed traditional statistical methods such as infotaxis, entrotaxis, and dual control for exploitation and exploration, as well as a non-statistical random action selection method. These improvements were evident in terms of success rate, mean traveled distance, and search time, highlighting AGDC's effectiveness and efficiency in complex, real-world scenarios.
VernaCopter: Disambiguated Natural-Language-Driven Robot via Formal Specifications
Authors: Teun van de Laar, Zengjie Zhang, Shuhao Qi, Sofie Haesaert, Zhiyong Sun
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00

It has been an ambition of many to control a robot for a complex task using natural language (NL). The rise of large language models (LLMs) makes it closer to coming true. However, an LLM-powered system still suffers from the ambiguity inherent in an NL and the uncertainty brought up by LLMs. This paper proposes a novel LLM-based robot motion planner, named \textit{VernaCopter}, with signal temporal logic (STL) specifications serving as a bridge between NL commands and specific task objectives. The rigorous and abstract nature of formal specifications allows the planner to generate high-quality and highly consistent paths to guide the motion control of a robot. Compared to a conventional NL-prompting-based planner, the proposed VernaCopter planner is more stable and reliable due to less ambiguous uncertainty. Its efficacy and advantage have been validated by two small but challenging experimental scenarios, implying its potential in designing NL-driven robots.
Enhancing Skin Disease Diagnosis: Interpretable Visual Concept Discovery with SAM
Authors: Xin Hu, Janet Wang, Jihun Hamm, Rie R Yotsu, Zhengming Ding
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Segmentation

Current AI-assisted skin image diagnosis has achieved dermatologist-level performance in classifying skin cancer, driven by rapid advancements in deep learning architectures. However, unlike traditional vision tasks, skin images in general present unique challenges due to the limited availability of well-annotated datasets, complex variations in conditions, and the necessity for detailed interpretations to ensure patient safety. Previous segmentation methods have sought to reduce image noise and enhance diagnostic performance, but these techniques require fine-grained, pixel-level ground truth masks for training. In contrast, with the rise of foundation models, the Segment Anything Model (SAM) has been introduced to facilitate promptable segmentation, enabling the automation of the segmentation process with simple yet effective prompts. Efforts applying SAM predominantly focus on dermatoscopy images, which present more easily identifiable lesion boundaries than clinical photos taken with smartphones. This limitation constrains the practicality of these approaches to real-world applications. To overcome the challenges posed by noisy clinical photos acquired via non-standardized protocols and to improve diagnostic accessibility, we propose a novel Cross-Attentive Fusion framework for interpretable skin lesion diagnosis. Our method leverages SAM to generate visual concepts for skin diseases using prompts, integrating local visual concepts with global image features to enhance model performance. Extensive evaluation on two skin disease datasets demonstrates our proposed method's effectiveness on lesion diagnosis and interpretability.
Deep Learning Under Siege: Identifying Security Vulnerabilities and Risk Mitigation Strategies
Authors: Jamal Al-Karaki, Muhammad Al-Zafar Khan, Mostafa Mohamad, Dababrata Chowdhury
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00

With the rise in the wholesale adoption of Deep Learning (DL) models in nearly all aspects of society, a unique set of challenges is imposed. Primarily centered around the architectures of these models, these risks pose a significant challenge, and addressing these challenges is key to their successful implementation and usage in the future. In this research, we present the security challenges associated with the current DL models deployed into production, as well as anticipate the challenges of future DL technologies based on the advancements in computing, AI, and hardware technologies. In addition, we propose risk mitigation techniques to inhibit these challenges and provide metrical evaluations to measure the effectiveness of these metrics.
Planning Transformer: Long-Horizon Offline Reinforcement Learning with Planning Tokens
Authors: Joseph Clinton, Robert Lieck
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: D4RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Supervised learning approaches to offline reinforcement learning, particularly those utilizing the Decision Transformer, have shown effectiveness in continuous environments and for sparse rewards. However, they often struggle with long-horizon tasks due to the high compounding error of auto-regressive models. To overcome this limitation, we go beyond next-token prediction and introduce Planning Tokens, which contain high-level, long time-scale information about the agent's future. Predicting dual time-scale tokens at regular intervals enables our model to use these long-horizon Planning Tokens as a form of implicit planning to guide its low-level policy and reduce compounding error. This architectural modification significantly enhances performance on long-horizon tasks, establishing a new state-of-the-art in complex D4RL environments. Additionally, we demonstrate that Planning Tokens improve the interpretability of the model's policy through the interpretable plan visualisations and attention map.
Explaining Deep Learning Embeddings for Speech Emotion Recognition by Predicting Interpretable Acoustic Features
Authors: Satvik Dixit, Daniel M. Low, Gasser Elbanna, Fabio Catania, Satrajit S. Ghosh
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, Speech Emotion Recognition

Pre-trained deep learning embeddings have consistently shown superior performance over handcrafted acoustic features in speech emotion recognition (SER). However, unlike acoustic features with clear physical meaning, these embeddings lack clear interpretability. Explaining these embeddings is crucial for building trust in healthcare and security applications and advancing the scientific understanding of the acoustic information that is encoded in them. This paper proposes a modified probing approach to explain deep learning embeddings in the SER space. We predict interpretable acoustic features (e.g., f0, loudness) from (i) the complete set of embeddings and (ii) a subset of the embedding dimensions identified as most important for predicting each emotion. If the subset of the most important dimensions better predicts a given emotion than all dimensions and also predicts specific acoustic features more accurately, we infer those acoustic features are important for the embedding model for the given task. We conducted experiments using the WavLM embeddings and eGeMAPS acoustic features as audio representations, applying our method to the RAVDESS and SAVEE emotional speech datasets. Based on this evaluation, we demonstrate that Energy, Frequency, Spectral, and Temporal categories of acoustic features provide diminishing information to SER in that order, demonstrating the utility of the probing classifier method to relate embeddings to interpretable acoustic features.
ESPnet-EZ: Python-only ESPnet for Easy Fine-tuning and Integration
Authors: Masao Someki, Kwanghee Choi, Siddhant Arora, William Chen, Samuele Cornell, Jionghao Han, Yifan Peng, Jiatong Shi, Vaibhav Srivastav, Shinji Watanabe
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00

We introduce ESPnet-EZ, an extension of the open-source speech processing toolkit ESPnet, aimed at quick and easy development of speech models. ESPnet-EZ focuses on two major aspects: (i) easy fine-tuning and inference of existing ESPnet models on various tasks and (ii) easy integration with popular deep neural network frameworks such as PyTorch-Lightning, Hugging Face transformers and datasets, and Lhotse. By replacing ESPnet design choices inherited from Kaldi with a Python-only, Bash-free interface, we dramatically reduce the effort required to build, debug, and use a new model. For example, to fine-tune a speech foundation model, ESPnet-EZ, compared to ESPnet, reduces the number of newly written code by 2.7x and the amount of dependent code by 6.7x while dramatically reducing the Bash script dependencies. The codebase of ESPnet-EZ is publicly available.
Synthetic4Health: Generating Annotated Synthetic Clinical Letters
Authors: Libo Ren, Samuel Belkadi, Lifeng Han, Warren Del-Pinto, Goran Nenadic
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER

Since clinical letters contain sensitive information, clinical-related datasets can not be widely applied in model training, medical research, and teaching. This work aims to generate reliable, various, and de-identified synthetic clinical letters. To achieve this goal, we explored different pre-trained language models (PLMs) for masking and generating text. After that, we worked on Bio\_ClinicalBERT, a high-performing model, and experimented with different masking strategies. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used for evaluation. Additionally, a downstream task, Named Entity Recognition (NER), was also implemented to assess the usability of these synthetic letters. The results indicate that 1) encoder-only models outperform encoder-decoder models. 2) Among encoder-only models, those trained on general corpora perform comparably to those trained on clinical data when clinical information is preserved. 3) Additionally, preserving clinical entities and document structure better aligns with our objectives than simply fine-tuning the model. 4) Furthermore, different masking strategies can impact the quality of synthetic clinical letters. Masking stopwords has a positive impact, while masking nouns or verbs has a negative effect. 5) For evaluation, BERTScore should be the primary quantitative evaluation metric, with other metrics serving as supplementary references. 6) Contextual information does not significantly impact the models' understanding, so the synthetic clinical letters have the potential to replace the original ones in downstream tasks.
Multi-Scale Grouped Prototypes for Interpretable Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Hugo Porta, Emanuele Dalsasso, Diego Marcos, Devis Tuia
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Prototypical part learning is emerging as a promising approach for making semantic segmentation interpretable. The model selects real patches seen during training as prototypes and constructs the dense prediction map based on the similarity between parts of the test image and the prototypes. This improves interpretability since the user can inspect the link between the predicted output and the patterns learned by the model in terms of prototypical information. In this paper, we propose a method for interpretable semantic segmentation that leverages multi-scale image representation for prototypical part learning. First, we introduce a prototype layer that explicitly learns diverse prototypical parts at several scales, leading to multi-scale representations in the prototype activation output. Then, we propose a sparse grouping mechanism that produces multi-scale sparse groups of these scale-specific prototypical parts. This provides a deeper understanding of the interactions between multi-scale object representations while enhancing the interpretability of the segmentation model. The experiments conducted on Pascal VOC, Cityscapes, and ADE20K demonstrate that the proposed method increases model sparsity, improves interpretability over existing prototype-based methods, and narrows the performance gap with the non-interpretable counterpart models. Code is available at github.com/eceo-epfl/ScaleProtoSeg.
Hacking, The Lazy Way: LLM Augmented Pentesting
Authors: Dhruva Goyal, Sitaraman Subramanian, Aditya Peela, Nisha P. Shetty
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

In our research, we introduce a new concept called "LLM Augmented Pentesting" demonstrated with a tool named "Pentest Copilot," that revolutionizes the field of ethical hacking by integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into penetration testing workflows, leveraging the advanced GPT-4-turbo model. Our approach focuses on overcoming the traditional resistance to automation in penetration testing by employing LLMs to automate specific sub-tasks while ensuring a comprehensive understanding of the overall testing process. Pentest Copilot showcases remarkable proficiency in tasks such as utilizing testing tools, interpreting outputs, and suggesting follow-up actions, efficiently bridging the gap between automated systems and human expertise. By integrating a "chain of thought" mechanism, Pentest Copilot optimizes token usage and enhances decision-making processes, leading to more accurate and context-aware outputs. Additionally, our implementation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) minimizes hallucinations and ensures the tool remains aligned with the latest cybersecurity techniques and knowledge. We also highlight a unique infrastructure system that supports in-browser penetration testing, providing a robust platform for cybersecurity professionals. Our findings demonstrate that LLM Augmented Pentesting can not only significantly enhance task completion rates in penetration testing but also effectively addresses real-world challenges, marking a substantial advancement in the cybersecurity domain.
Enumerating Minimal Unsatisfiable Cores of LTLf formulas
Authors: Antonio Ielo, Giuseppe Mazzotta, Rafael Peñaloza, Francesco Ricca
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00

Linear Temporal Logic over finite traces ($\text{LTL}_f$) is a widely used formalism with applications in AI, process mining, model checking, and more. The primary reasoning task for $\text{LTL}_f$ is satisfiability checking; yet, the recent focus on explainable AI has increased interest in analyzing inconsistent formulas, making the enumeration of minimal explanations for infeasibility a relevant task also for $\text{LTL}_f$. This paper introduces a novel technique for enumerating minimal unsatisfiable cores (MUCs) of an $\text{LTL}_f$ specification. The main idea is to encode a $\text{LTL}_f$ formula into an Answer Set Programming (ASP) specification, such that the minimal unsatisfiable subsets (MUSes) of the ASP program directly correspond to the MUCs of the original $\text{LTL}_f$ specification. Leveraging recent advancements in ASP solving yields a MUC enumerator achieving good performance in experiments conducted on established benchmarks from the literature.
From FDG to PSMA: A Hitchhiker's Guide to Multitracer, Multicenter Lesion Segmentation in PET/CT Imaging
Authors: Maximilian Rokuss, Balint Kovacs, Yannick Kirchhoff, Shuhan Xiao, Constantin Ulrich, Klaus H. Maier-Hein, Fabian Isensee
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Lesion Segmentation

Automated lesion segmentation in PET/CT scans is crucial for improving clinical workflows and advancing cancer diagnostics. However, the task is challenging due to physiological variability, different tracers used in PET imaging, and diverse imaging protocols across medical centers. To address this, the autoPET series was created to challenge researchers to develop algorithms that generalize across diverse PET/CT environments. This paper presents our solution for the autoPET III challenge, targeting multitracer, multicenter generalization using the nnU-Net framework with the ResEncL architecture. Key techniques include misalignment data augmentation and multi-modal pretraining across CT, MR, and PET datasets to provide an initial anatomical understanding. We incorporate organ supervision as a multitask approach, enabling the model to distinguish between physiological uptake and tracer-specific patterns, which is particularly beneficial in cases where no lesions are present. Compared to the default nnU-Net, which achieved a Dice score of 57.61, or the larger ResEncL (65.31) our model significantly improved performance with a Dice score of 68.40, alongside a reduction in false positive (FPvol: 7.82) and false negative (FNvol: 10.35) volumes. These results underscore the effectiveness of combining advanced network design, augmentation, pretraining, and multitask learning for PET/CT lesion segmentation. After evaluation on the test set, our approach was awarded the first place in the model-centric category (Team LesionTracer). Code is publicly available at https://github.com/MIC-DKFZ/autopet-3-submission.
TX-Gen: Multi-Objective Optimization for Sparse Counterfactual Explanations for Time-Series Classification
Authors: Qi Huang, Sofoklis Kitharidis, Thomas Bäck, Niki van Stein
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Time Series, Time Series Classification, valid

In time-series classification, understanding model decisions is crucial for their application in high-stakes domains such as healthcare and finance. Counterfactual explanations, which provide insights by presenting alternative inputs that change model predictions, offer a promising solution. However, existing methods for generating counterfactual explanations for time-series data often struggle with balancing key objectives like proximity, sparsity, and validity. In this paper, we introduce TX-Gen, a novel algorithm for generating counterfactual explanations based on the Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II (NSGA-II). TX-Gen leverages evolutionary multi-objective optimization to find a diverse set of counterfactuals that are both sparse and valid, while maintaining minimal dissimilarity to the original time series. By incorporating a flexible reference-guided mechanism, our method improves the plausibility and interpretability of the counterfactuals without relying on predefined assumptions. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets demonstrate that TX-Gen outperforms existing methods in generating high-quality counterfactuals, making time-series models more transparent and interpretable.
MulCPred: Learning Multi-modal Concepts for Explainable Pedestrian Action Prediction
Authors: Yan Feng, Alexander Carballo, Keisuke Fujii, Robin Karlsson, Ming Ding, Kazuya Takeda
Date: 2024-09-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

Pedestrian action prediction is of great significance for many applications such as autonomous driving. However, state-of-the-art methods lack explainability to make trustworthy predictions. In this paper, a novel framework called MulCPred is proposed that explains its predictions based on multi-modal concepts represented by training samples. Previous concept-based methods have limitations including: 1) they cannot directly apply to multi-modal cases; 2) they lack locality to attend to details in the inputs; 3) they suffer from mode collapse. These limitations are tackled accordingly through the following approaches: 1) a linear aggregator to integrate the activation results of the concepts into predictions, which associates concepts of different modalities and provides ante-hoc explanations of the relevance between the concepts and the predictions; 2) a channel-wise recalibration module that attends to local spatiotemporal regions, which enables the concepts with locality; 3) a feature regularization loss that encourages the concepts to learn diverse patterns. MulCPred is evaluated on multiple datasets and tasks. Both qualitative and quantitative results demonstrate that MulCPred is promising in improving the explainability of pedestrian action prediction without obvious performance degradation. Furthermore, by removing unrecognizable concepts from MulCPred, the cross-dataset prediction performance is improved, indicating the feasibility of further generalizability of MulCPred.