pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Ethical AI in Retail: Consumer Privacy and Fairness
Authors: Anthonette Adanyin
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Fairness

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) in retail has significantly transformed the industry, enabling more personalized services and efficient operations. However, the rapid implementation of AI technologies raises ethical concerns, particularly regarding consumer privacy and fairness. This study aims to analyze the ethical challenges of AI applications in retail, explore ways retailers can implement AI technologies ethically while remaining competitive, and provide recommendations on ethical AI practices. A descriptive survey design was used to collect data from 300 respondents across major e-commerce platforms. Data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, including percentages and mean scores. Findings shows a high level of concerns among consumers regarding the amount of personal data collected by AI-driven retail applications, with many expressing a lack of trust in how their data is managed. Also, fairness is another major issue, as a majority believe AI systems do not treat consumers equally, raising concerns about algorithmic bias. It was also found that AI can enhance business competitiveness and efficiency without compromising ethical principles, such as data privacy and fairness. Data privacy and transparency were highlighted as critical areas where retailers need to focus their efforts, indicating a strong demand for stricter data protection protocols and ongoing scrutiny of AI systems. The study concludes that retailers must prioritize transparency, fairness, and data protection when deploying AI systems. The study recommends ensuring transparency in AI processes, conducting regular audits to address biases, incorporating consumer feedback in AI development, and emphasizing consumer data privacy.
Faster-GCG: Efficient Discrete Optimization Jailbreak Attacks against Aligned Large Language Models
Authors: Xiao Li, Zhuhong Li, Qiongxiu Li, Bingze Lee, Jinghao Cui, Xiaolin Hu
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00

Aligned Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across various tasks. However, LLMs remain susceptible to jailbreak adversarial attacks, where adversaries manipulate prompts to elicit malicious responses that aligned LLMs should have avoided. Identifying these vulnerabilities is crucial for understanding the inherent weaknesses of LLMs and preventing their potential misuse. One pioneering work in jailbreaking is the GCG attack, a discrete token optimization algorithm that seeks to find a suffix capable of jailbreaking aligned LLMs. Despite the success of GCG, we find it suboptimal, requiring significantly large computational costs, and the achieved jailbreaking performance is limited. In this work, we propose Faster-GCG, an efficient adversarial jailbreak method by delving deep into the design of GCG. Experiments demonstrate that Faster-GCG can surpass the original GCG with only 1/10 of the computational cost, achieving significantly higher attack success rates on various open-source aligned LLMs. In addition, We demonstrate that Faster-GCG exhibits improved attack transferability when testing on closed-sourced LLMs such as ChatGPT.
LAC: Graph Contrastive Learning with Learnable Augmentation in Continuous Space
Authors: Zhenyu Lin, Hongzheng Li, Yingxia Shao, Guanhua Ye, Yawen Li, Quanqing Xu
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Diversity

Graph Contrastive Learning frameworks have demonstrated success in generating high-quality node representations. The existing research on efficient data augmentation methods and ideal pretext tasks for graph contrastive learning remains limited, resulting in suboptimal node representation in the unsupervised setting. In this paper, we introduce LAC, a graph contrastive learning framework with learnable data augmentation in an orthogonal continuous space. To capture the representative information in the graph data during augmentation, we introduce a continuous view augmenter, that applies both a masked topology augmentation module and a cross-channel feature augmentation module to adaptively augment the topological information and the feature information within an orthogonal continuous space, respectively. The orthogonal nature of continuous space ensures that the augmentation process avoids dimension collapse. To enhance the effectiveness of pretext tasks, we propose an information-theoretic principle named InfoBal and introduce corresponding pretext tasks. These tasks enable the continuous view augmenter to maintain consistency in the representative information across views while maximizing diversity between views, and allow the encoder to fully utilize the representative information in the unsupervised setting. Our experimental results show that LAC significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art frameworks.
YOLO-RD: Introducing Relevant and Compact Explicit Knowledge to YOLO by Retriever-Dictionary
Authors: Hao-Tang Tsui, Chien-Yao Wang, Hong-Yuan Mark Liao
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Identifying and localizing objects within images is a fundamental challenge, and numerous efforts have been made to enhance model accuracy by experimenting with diverse architectures and refining training strategies. Nevertheless, a prevalent limitation in existing models is overemphasizing the current input while ignoring the information from the entire dataset. We introduce an innovative {\em \textbf{R}etriever}-{\em\textbf{D}ictionary} (RD) module to address this issue. This architecture enables YOLO-based models to efficiently retrieve features from a Dictionary that contains the insight of the dataset, which is built by the knowledge from Visual Models (VM), Large Language Models (LLM), or Visual Language Models (VLM). The flexible RD enables the model to incorporate such explicit knowledge that enhances the ability to benefit multiple tasks, specifically, segmentation, detection, and classification, from pixel to image level. The experiments show that using the RD significantly improves model performance, achieving more than a 3\% increase in mean Average Precision for object detection with less than a 1\% increase in model parameters. Beyond 1-stage object detection models, the RD module improves the effectiveness of 2-stage models and DETR-based architectures, such as Faster R-CNN and Deformable DETR
POSE: Pose estimation Of virtual Sync Exhibit system
Authors: Hao-Tang Tsui, Yu-Rou Tuan, Jia-You Chen
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

This work is a portable MetaVerse implementation, and we use 3D pose estimation with AI to make virtual avatars do synchronized actions and interact with the environment. The motivation is that we find it inconvenient to use joysticks and sensors when playing with fitness rings. In order to replace joysticks and reduce costs, we developed a platform that can control virtual avatars through pose estimation to identify the movements of real people, and we also implemented a multi-process to achieve modularization and reduce the overall latency.
IKDP: Inverse Kinematics through Diffusion Process
Authors: Hao-Tang Tsui, Yu-Rou Tuan, Hong-Han Shuai
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Position

It is a common problem in robotics to specify the position of each joint of the robot so that the endpoint reaches a certain target in space. This can be solved in two ways, forward kinematics method and inverse kinematics method. However, inverse kinematics cannot be solved by an algorithm. The common method is the Jacobian inverse technique, and some people have tried to find the answer by machine learning. In this project, we will show how to use the Conditional Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model to integrate the solution of calculating IK. Index Terms: Inverse kinematics, Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model, self Attention, Transformer
FoMo: A Foundation Model for Mobile Traffic Forecasting with Diffusion Model
Authors: Haoye Chai, Xiaoqian Qi, Shiyuan Zhang, Yong Li
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Few-Shot Learning, model, Scheduling, Transfer Learning

Mobile traffic forecasting allows operators to anticipate network dynamics and performance in advance, offering substantial potential for enhancing service quality and improving user experience. However, existing models are often task-oriented and are trained with tailored data, which limits their effectiveness in diverse mobile network tasks of Base Station (BS) deployment, resource allocation, energy optimization, etc. and hinders generalization across different urban environments. Foundation models have made remarkable strides across various domains of NLP and CV due to their multi-tasking adaption and zero/few-shot learning capabilities. In this paper, we propose an innovative Foundation model for Mo}bile traffic forecasting (FoMo), aiming to handle diverse forecasting tasks of short/long-term predictions and distribution generation across multiple cities to support network planning and optimization. FoMo combines diffusion models and transformers, where various spatio-temporal masks are proposed to enable FoMo to learn intrinsic features of different tasks, and a contrastive learning strategy is developed to capture the correlations between mobile traffic and urban contexts, thereby improving its transfer learning capability. Extensive experiments on 9 real-world datasets demonstrate that FoMo outperforms current models concerning diverse forecasting tasks and zero/few-shot learning, showcasing a strong universality.
Causality for Large Language Models
Authors: Anpeng Wu, Kun Kuang, Minqin Zhu, Yingrong Wang, Yujia Zheng, Kairong Han, Baohong Li, Guangyi Chen, Fei Wu, Kun Zhang
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering

Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence have driven a paradigm shift, where large language models (LLMs) with billions or trillions of parameters are trained on vast datasets, achieving unprecedented success across a series of language tasks. However, despite these successes, LLMs still rely on probabilistic modeling, which often captures spurious correlations rooted in linguistic patterns and social stereotypes, rather than the true causal relationships between entities and events. This limitation renders LLMs vulnerable to issues such as demographic biases, social stereotypes, and LLM hallucinations. These challenges highlight the urgent need to integrate causality into LLMs, moving beyond correlation-driven paradigms to build more reliable and ethically aligned AI systems. While many existing surveys and studies focus on utilizing prompt engineering to activate LLMs for causal knowledge or developing benchmarks to assess their causal reasoning abilities, most of these efforts rely on human intervention to activate pre-trained models. How to embed causality into the training process of LLMs and build more general and intelligent models remains unexplored. Recent research highlights that LLMs function as causal parrots, capable of reciting causal knowledge without truly understanding or applying it. These prompt-based methods are still limited to human interventional improvements. This survey aims to address this gap by exploring how causality can enhance LLMs at every stage of their lifecycle-from token embedding learning and foundation model training to fine-tuning, alignment, inference, and evaluation-paving the way for more interpretable, reliable, and causally-informed models. Additionally, we further outline six promising future directions to advance LLM development, enhance their causal reasoning capabilities, and address the current limitations these models face.
SNAP: Stopping Catastrophic Forgetting in Hebbian Learning with Sigmoidal Neuronal Adaptive Plasticity
Authors: Tianyi Xu, Patrick Zheng, Shiyan Liu, Sicheng Lyu, Isabeau Prémont-Schwarz
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00

Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) suffer from catastrophic forgetting, where the learning of new tasks causes the catastrophic forgetting of old tasks. Existing Machine Learning (ML) algorithms, including those using Stochastic Gradient Descent (SGD) and Hebbian Learning typically update their weights linearly with experience i.e., independently of their current strength. This contrasts with biological neurons, which at intermediate strengths are very plastic, but consolidate with Long-Term Potentiation (LTP) once they reach a certain strength. We hypothesize this mechanism might help mitigate catastrophic forgetting. We introduce Sigmoidal Neuronal Adaptive Plasticity (SNAP) an artificial approximation to Long-Term Potentiation for ANNs by having the weights follow a sigmoidal growth behaviour allowing the weights to consolidate and stabilize when they reach sufficiently large or small values. We then compare SNAP to linear weight growth and exponential weight growth and see that SNAP completely prevents the forgetting of previous tasks for Hebbian Learning but not for SGD-base learning.
Synergistic Dual Spatial-aware Generation of Image-to-Text and Text-to-Image
Authors: Yu Zhao, Hao Fei, Xiangtai Li, Libo Qin, Jiayi Ji, Hongyuan Zhu, Meishan Zhang, Min Zhang, Jianguo Wei
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image to text

In the visual spatial understanding (VSU) area, spatial image-to-text (SI2T) and spatial text-to-image (ST2I) are two fundamental tasks that appear in dual form. Existing methods for standalone SI2T or ST2I perform imperfectly in spatial understanding, due to the difficulty of 3D-wise spatial feature modeling. In this work, we consider modeling the SI2T and ST2I together under a dual learning framework. During the dual framework, we then propose to represent the 3D spatial scene features with a novel 3D scene graph (3DSG) representation that can be shared and beneficial to both tasks. Further, inspired by the intuition that the easier 3D$\to$image and 3D$\to$text processes also exist symmetrically in the ST2I and SI2T, respectively, we propose the Spatial Dual Discrete Diffusion (SD$^3$) framework, which utilizes the intermediate features of the 3D$\to$X processes to guide the hard X$\to$3D processes, such that the overall ST2I and SI2T will benefit each other. On the visual spatial understanding dataset VSD, our system outperforms the mainstream T2I and I2T methods significantly. Further in-depth analysis reveals how our dual learning strategy advances.
Who is Undercover? Guiding LLMs to Explore Multi-Perspective Team Tactic in the Game
Authors: Ruiqi Dong, Zhixuan Liao, Guangwei Lai, Yuhan Ma, Danni Ma, Chenyou Fan
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diversity, Fairness

Large Language Models (LLMs) are pivotal AI agents in complex tasks but still face challenges in open decision-making problems within complex scenarios. To address this, we use the language logic game ``Who is Undercover?'' (WIU) as an experimental platform to propose the Multi-Perspective Team Tactic (MPTT) framework. MPTT aims to cultivate LLMs' human-like language expression logic, multi-dimensional thinking, and self-perception in complex scenarios. By alternating speaking and voting sessions, integrating techniques like self-perspective, identity-determination, self-reflection, self-summary and multi-round find-teammates, LLM agents make rational decisions through strategic concealment and communication, fostering human-like trust. Preliminary results show that MPTT, combined with WIU, leverages LLMs' cognitive capabilities to create a decision-making framework that can simulate real society. This framework aids minority groups in communication and expression, promoting fairness and diversity in decision-making. Additionally, our Human-in-the-loop experiments demonstrate that LLMs can learn and align with human behaviors through interactive, indicating their potential for active participation in societal decision-making.
LlamaLens: Specialized Multilingual LLM for Analyzing News and Social Media Content
Authors: Mohamed Bayan Kmainasi, Ali Ezzat Shahroor, Maram Hasanain, Sahinur Rahman Laskar, Naeemul Hassan, Firoj Alam
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Specificity

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable success as general-purpose task solvers across various fields, including NLP, healthcare, finance, and law. However, their capabilities remain limited when addressing domain-specific problems, particularly in downstream NLP tasks. Research has shown that models fine-tuned on instruction-based downstream NLP datasets outperform those that are not fine-tuned. While most efforts in this area have primarily focused on resource-rich languages like English and broad domains, little attention has been given to multilingual settings and specific domains. To address this gap, this study focuses on developing a specialized LLM, LlamaLens, for analyzing news and social media content in a multilingual context. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to tackle both domain specificity and multilinguality, with a particular focus on news and social media. Our experimental setup includes 19 tasks, represented by 52 datasets covering Arabic, English, and Hindi. We demonstrate that LlamaLens outperforms the current state-of-the-art (SOTA) on 16 testing sets, and achieves comparable performance on 10 sets. We make the models and resources publicly available for the research community.(https://huggingface.co/QCRI)
Redefining Proactivity for Information Seeking Dialogue
Authors: Jing Yang Lee, Seokhwan Kim, Kartik Mehta, Jiun-Yu Kao, Yu-Hsiang Lin, Arpit Gupta
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00

Information-Seeking Dialogue (ISD) agents aim to provide accurate responses to user queries. While proficient in directly addressing user queries, these agents, as well as LLMs in general, predominantly exhibit reactive behavior, lacking the ability to generate proactive responses that actively engage users in sustained conversations. However, existing definitions of proactive dialogue in this context do not focus on how each response actively engages the user and sustains the conversation. Hence, we present a new definition of proactivity that focuses on enhancing the `proactiveness' of each generated response via the introduction of new information related to the initial query. To this end, we construct a proactive dialogue dataset comprising 2,000 single-turn conversations, and introduce several automatic metrics to evaluate response `proactiveness' which achieved high correlation with human annotation. Additionally, we introduce two innovative Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts, the 3-step CoT and the 3-in-1 CoT prompts, which consistently outperform standard prompts by up to 90% in the zero-shot setting.
Fractional-order spike-timing-dependent gradient descent for multi-layer spiking neural networks
Authors: Yi Yang, Richard M. Voyles, Haiyan H. Zhang, Robert A. Nawrocki
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00

Accumulated detailed knowledge about the neuronal activities in human brains has brought more attention to bio-inspired spiking neural networks (SNNs). In contrast to non-spiking deep neural networks (DNNs), SNNs can encode and transmit spatiotemporal information more efficiently by exploiting biologically realistic and low-power event-driven neuromorphic architectures. However, the supervised learning of SNNs still remains a challenge because the spike-timing-dependent plasticity (STDP) of connected spiking neurons is difficult to implement and interpret in existing backpropagation learning schemes. This paper proposes a fractional-order spike-timing-dependent gradient descent (FO-STDGD) learning model by considering a derived nonlinear activation function that describes the relationship between the quasi-instantaneous firing rate and the temporal membrane potentials of nonleaky integrate-and-fire neurons. The training strategy can be generalized to any fractional orders between 0 and 2 since the FO-STDGD incorporates the fractional gradient descent method into the calculation of spike-timing-dependent loss gradients. The proposed FO-STDGD model is tested on the MNIST and DVS128 Gesture datasets and its accuracy under different network structure and fractional orders is analyzed. It can be found that the classification accuracy increases as the fractional order increases, and specifically, the case of fractional order 1.9 improves by 155% relative to the case of fractional order 1 (traditional gradient descent). In addition, our scheme demonstrates the state-of-the-art computational efficacy for the same SNN structure and training epochs.
Contextual Augmented Multi-Model Programming (CAMP): A Hybrid Local-Cloud Copilot Framework
Authors: Yuchen Wang, Shangxin Guo, Chee Wei Tan
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Completion, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The advancements in cloud-based Large Languages Models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI-assisted programming. However, their integration into certain local development environments like ones within the Apple software ecosystem (e.g., iOS apps, macOS) remains challenging due to computational demands and sandboxed constraints. This paper presents CAMP, a multi-model AI-assisted programming framework that consists of a local model that employs Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to retrieve contextual information from the codebase to facilitate context-aware prompt construction thus optimizing the performance of the cloud model, empowering LLMs' capabilities in local Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). The methodology is actualized in Copilot for Xcode, an AI-assisted programming tool crafted for Xcode that employs the RAG module to address software constraints and enables diverse generative programming tasks, including automatic code completion, documentation, error detection, and intelligent user-agent interaction. The results from objective experiments on generated code quality and subjective experiments on user adoption collectively demonstrate the pilot success of the proposed system and mark its significant contributions to the realm of AI-assisted programming.
Large Language Models for Autonomous Driving (LLM4AD): Concept, Benchmark, Experiments, and Challenges
Authors: Can Cui, Yunsheng Ma, Zichong Yang, Yupeng Zhou, Peiran Liu, Juanwu Lu, Lingxi Li, Yaobin Chen, Jitesh H. Panchal, Amr Abdelraouf, Rohit Gupta, Kyungtae Han, Ziran Wang
Date: 2024-10-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decision Making, Instruction Following, Natural Language Understanding, Novel Concepts, Scene Understanding

With the broader usage and highly successful development of Large Language Models (LLMs), there has been a growth of interest and demand for applying LLMs to autonomous driving technology. Driven by their natural language understanding and reasoning ability, LLMs have the potential to enhance various aspects of autonomous driving systems, from perception and scene understanding to language interaction and decision-making. In this paper, we first introduce the novel concept of designing LLMs for autonomous driving (LLM4AD). Then, we propose a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the instruction-following abilities of LLM4AD in simulation. Furthermore, we conduct a series of experiments on real-world vehicle platforms, thoroughly evaluating the performance and potential of our LLM4AD systems. Finally, we envision the main challenges of LLM4AD, including latency, deployment, security and privacy, safety, trust and transparency, and personalization. Our research highlights the significant potential of LLMs to enhance various aspects of autonomous vehicle technology, from perception and scene understanding to language interaction and decision-making.