pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Articulated Animal AI: An Environment for Animal-like Cognition in a Limbed Agent
Authors: Jeremy Lucas, Isabeau Prémont-Schwarz
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

This paper presents the Articulated Animal AI Environment for Animal Cognition, an enhanced version of the previous AnimalAI Environment. Key improvements include the addition of agent limbs, enabling more complex behaviors and interactions with the environment that closely resemble real animal movements. The testbench features an integrated curriculum training sequence and evaluation tools, eliminating the need for users to develop their own training programs. Additionally, the tests and training procedures are randomized, which will improve the agent's generalization capabilities. These advancements significantly expand upon the original AnimalAI framework and will be used to evaluate agents on various aspects of animal cognition.
One Step at a Time: Combining LLMs and Static Analysis to Generate Next-Step Hints for Programming Tasks
Authors: Anastasiia Birillo, Elizaveta Artser, Anna Potriasaeva, Ilya Vlasov, Katsiaryna Dzialets, Yaroslav Golubev, Igor Gerasimov, Hieke Keuning, Timofey Bryksin
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Hint Generation

Students often struggle with solving programming problems when learning to code, especially when they have to do it online, with one of the most common disadvantages of working online being the lack of personalized help. This help can be provided as next-step hint generation, i.e., showing a student what specific small step they need to do next to get to the correct solution. There are many ways to generate such hints, with large language models (LLMs) being among the most actively studied right now. While LLMs constitute a promising technology for providing personalized help, combining them with other techniques, such as static analysis, can significantly improve the output quality. In this work, we utilize this idea and propose a novel system to provide both textual and code hints for programming tasks. The pipeline of the proposed approach uses a chain-of-thought prompting technique and consists of three distinct steps: (1) generating subgoals - a list of actions to proceed with the task from the current student's solution, (2) generating the code to achieve the next subgoal, and (3) generating the text to describe this needed action. During the second step, we apply static analysis to the generated code to control its size and quality. The tool is implemented as a modification to the open-source JetBrains Academy plugin, supporting students in their in-IDE courses. To evaluate our approach, we propose a list of criteria for all steps in our pipeline and conduct two rounds of expert validation. Finally, we evaluate the next-step hints in a classroom with 14 students from two universities. Our results show that both forms of the hints - textual and code - were helpful for the students, and the proposed system helped them to proceed with the coding tasks.
ReasonPlanner: Enhancing Autonomous Planning in Dynamic Environments with Temporal Knowledge Graphs and LLMs
Authors: Minh Pham Dinh, Munira Syed, Michael G Yankoski, Trenton W. Ford
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

Planning and performing interactive tasks, such as conducting experiments to determine the melting point of an unknown substance, is straightforward for humans but poses significant challenges for autonomous agents. We introduce ReasonPlanner, a novel generalist agent designed for reflective thinking, planning, and interactive reasoning. This agent leverages LLMs to plan hypothetical trajectories by building a World Model based on a Temporal Knowledge Graph. The agent interacts with the environment using a natural language actor-critic module, where the actor translates the imagined trajectory into a sequence of actionable steps, and the critic determines if replanning is necessary. ReasonPlanner significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art prompting-based methods on the ScienceWorld benchmark by more than 1.8 times, while being more sample-efficient and interpretable. It relies solely on frozen weights thus requiring no gradient updates. ReasonPlanner can be deployed and utilized without specialized knowledge of Machine Learning, making it accessible to a wide range of users.
Quantum-Trained Convolutional Neural Network for Deepfake Audio Detection
Authors: Chu-Hsuan Abraham Lin, Chen-Yu Liu, Samuel Yen-Chi Chen, Kuan-Cheng Chen
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping, Quantum Machine Learning

The rise of deepfake technologies has posed significant challenges to privacy, security, and information integrity, particularly in audio and multimedia content. This paper introduces a Quantum-Trained Convolutional Neural Network (QT-CNN) framework designed to enhance the detection of deepfake audio, leveraging the computational power of quantum machine learning (QML). The QT-CNN employs a hybrid quantum-classical approach, integrating Quantum Neural Networks (QNNs) with classical neural architectures to optimize training efficiency while reducing the number of trainable parameters. Our method incorporates a novel quantum-to-classical parameter mapping that effectively utilizes quantum states to enhance the expressive power of the model, achieving up to 70% parameter reduction compared to classical models without compromising accuracy. Data pre-processing involved extracting essential audio features, label encoding, feature scaling, and constructing sequential datasets for robust model evaluation. Experimental results demonstrate that the QT-CNN achieves comparable performance to traditional CNNs, maintaining high accuracy during training and testing phases across varying configurations of QNN blocks. The QT framework's ability to reduce computational overhead while maintaining performance underscores its potential for real-world applications in deepfake detection and other resource-constrained scenarios. This work highlights the practical benefits of integrating quantum computing into artificial intelligence, offering a scalable and efficient approach to advancing deepfake detection technologies.
Benchmark Inflation: Revealing LLM Performance Gaps Using Retro-Holdouts
Authors: Jacob Haimes, Cenny Wenner, Kunvar Thaman, Vassil Tashev, Clement Neo, Esben Kran, Jason Schreiber
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Holdout Set, Misconceptions, TruthfulQA

The training data for many Large Language Models (LLMs) is contaminated with test data. This means that public benchmarks used to assess LLMs are compromised, suggesting a performance gap between benchmark scores and actual capabilities. Ideally, a private holdout set could be used to accurately verify scores. Unfortunately, such datasets do not exist for most benchmarks, and post-hoc construction of sufficiently similar datasets is non-trivial. To address these issues, we introduce a systematic methodology for (i) retrospectively constructing a holdout dataset for a target dataset, (ii) demonstrating the statistical indistinguishability of this retro-holdout dataset, and (iii) comparing LLMs on the two datasets to quantify the performance gap due to the dataset's public availability. Applying these methods to TruthfulQA, we construct and release Retro-Misconceptions, on which we evaluate twenty LLMs and find that some have inflated scores by as much as 16 percentage points. Our results demonstrate that public benchmark scores do not always accurately assess model properties, and underscore the importance of improved data practices in the field.
DFM: Interpolant-free Dual Flow Matching
Authors: Denis Gudovskiy, Tomoyuki Okuno, Yohei Nakata
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Unsupervised Anomaly Detection

Continuous normalizing flows (CNFs) can model data distributions with expressive infinite-length architectures. But this modeling involves computationally expensive process of solving an ordinary differential equation (ODE) during maximum likelihood training. Recently proposed flow matching (FM) framework allows to substantially simplify the training phase using a regression objective with the interpolated forward vector field. In this paper, we propose an interpolant-free dual flow matching (DFM) approach without explicit assumptions about the modeled vector field. DFM optimizes the forward and, additionally, a reverse vector field model using a novel objective that facilitates bijectivity of the forward and reverse transformations. Our experiments with the SMAP unsupervised anomaly detection show advantages of DFM when compared to the CNF trained with either maximum likelihood or FM objectives with the state-of-the-art performance metrics.
Using off-the-shelf LLMs to query enterprise data by progressively revealing ontologies
Authors: C. Civili, E. Sherkhonov, R. E. K. Stirewalt
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Natural Language Queries

Ontologies are known to improve the accuracy of Large Language Models (LLMs) when translating natural language queries into a formal query language like SQL or SPARQL. There are two ways to leverage ontologies when working with LLMs. One is to fine-tune the model, i.e., to enhance it with specific domain knowledge. Another is the zero-shot prompting approach, where the ontology is provided as part of the input question. Unfortunately, modern enterprises typically have ontologies that are too large to fit in a prompt due to LLM's token size limitations. We present a solution that incrementally reveals "just enough" of an ontology that is needed to answer a given question.
Improving semantic understanding in speech language models via brain-tuning
Authors: Omer Moussa, Dietrich Klakow, Mariya Toneva
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

Speech language models align with human brain responses to natural language to an impressive degree. However, current models rely heavily on low-level speech features, indicating they lack brain-relevant semantics which limits their utility as model organisms of semantic processing in the brain. In this work, we address this limitation by inducing brain-relevant bias directly into the models via fine-tuning with fMRI recordings of people listening to natural stories, a process we name brain-tuning. After testing it on 3 different pretrained model families, we show that brain-tuning not only improves overall alignment with new brain recordings in semantic language regions, but also reduces the reliance on low-level speech features for this alignment. Excitingly, we further show that brain-tuning leads to 1) consistent improvements in performance on a range of downstream tasks and 2) a representational space with increased semantic preference. Our results provide converging evidence, for the first time, that incorporating brain signals into the training of language models improves the models' semantic understanding.
The Same But Different: Structural Similarities and Differences in Multilingual Language Modeling
Authors: Ruochen Zhang, Qinan Yu, Matianyu Zang, Carsten Eickhoff, Ellie Pavlick
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We employ new tools from mechanistic interpretability in order to ask whether the internal structure of large language models (LLMs) shows correspondence to the linguistic structures which underlie the languages on which they are trained. In particular, we ask (1) when two languages employ the same morphosyntactic processes, do LLMs handle them using shared internal circuitry? and (2) when two languages require different morphosyntactic processes, do LLMs handle them using different internal circuitry? Using English and Chinese multilingual and monolingual models, we analyze the internal circuitry involved in two tasks. We find evidence that models employ the same circuit to handle the same syntactic process independently of the language in which it occurs, and that this is the case even for monolingual models trained completely independently. Moreover, we show that multilingual models employ language-specific components (attention heads and feed-forward networks) when needed to handle linguistic processes (e.g., morphological marking) that only exist in some languages. Together, our results provide new insights into how LLMs trade off between exploiting common structures and preserving linguistic differences when tasked with modeling multiple languages simultaneously.
Continual Learning with Neuromorphic Computing: Theories, Methods, and Applications
Authors: Mishal Fatima Minhas, Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Falah Awwad, Osman Hasan, Muhammad Shafique
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning

To adapt to real-world dynamics, intelligent systems need to assimilate new knowledge without catastrophic forgetting, where learning new tasks leads to a degradation in performance on old tasks. To address this, continual learning concept is proposed for enabling autonomous systems to acquire new knowledge and dynamically adapt to changing environments. Specifically, energy-efficient continual learning is needed to ensure the functionality of autonomous systems under tight compute and memory resource budgets (i.e., so-called autonomous embedded systems). Neuromorphic computing, with brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), offers inherent advantages for enabling low-power/energy continual learning in autonomous embedded systems. In this paper, we comprehensively discuss the foundations and methods for enabling continual learning in neural networks, then analyze the state-of-the-art works considering SNNs. Afterward, comparative analyses of existing methods are conducted while considering crucial design factors, such as network complexity, memory, latency, and power/energy efficiency. We also explore the practical applications that can benefit from SNN-based continual learning and open challenges in real-world scenarios. In this manner, our survey provides valuable insights into the recent advancements of SNN-based continual learning for real-world application use-cases.
P-FOLIO: Evaluating and Improving Logical Reasoning with Abundant Human-Written Reasoning Chains
Authors: Simeng Han, Aaron Yu, Rui Shen, Zhenting Qi, Martin Riddell, Wenfei Zhou, Yujie Qiao, Yilun Zhao, Semih Yavuz, Ye Liu, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou, Caiming Xiong, Dragomir Radev, Rex Ying, Arman Cohan
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, Logical Reasoning

Existing methods on understanding the capabilities of LLMs in logical reasoning rely on binary entailment classification or synthetically derived rationales, which are not sufficient for proper investigation of model's capabilities. We present P-FOLIO, a human-annotated dataset consisting of diverse and complex reasoning chains for a set of realistic logical reasoning stories also written by humans. P-FOLIO is collected with an annotation protocol that facilitates humans to annotate well-structured natural language proofs for first-order logic reasoning problems in a step-by-step manner. The number of reasoning steps in P-FOLIO span from 0 to 20. We further use P-FOLIO to evaluate and improve large-language-model (LLM) reasoning capabilities. We evaluate LLM reasoning capabilities at a fine granularity via single-step inference rule classification, with more diverse inference rules of more diverse and higher levels of complexities than previous works. Given that a single model-generated reasoning chain could take a completely different path than the human-annotated one, we sample multiple reasoning chains from a model and use pass@k metrics for evaluating the quality of model-generated reasoning chains. We show that human-written reasoning chains significantly boost the logical reasoning capabilities of LLMs via many-shot prompting and fine-tuning. Furthermore, fine-tuning Llama3-7B on P-FOLIO improves the model performance by 10% or more on three other out-of-domain logical reasoning datasets. We also conduct detailed analysis to show where most powerful LLMs fall short in reasoning. We will release the dataset and code publicly.
pyhgf: A neural network library for predictive coding
Authors: Nicolas Legrand, Lilian Weber, Peter Thestrup Waade, Anna Hedvig Møller Daugaard, Mojtaba Khodadadi, Nace Mikuš, Chris Mathys
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Meta-Learning

Bayesian models of cognition have gained considerable traction in computational neuroscience and psychiatry. Their scopes are now expected to expand rapidly to artificial intelligence, providing general inference frameworks to support embodied, adaptable, and energy-efficient autonomous agents. A central theory in this domain is predictive coding, which posits that learning and behaviour are driven by hierarchical probabilistic inferences about the causes of sensory inputs. Biological realism constrains these networks to rely on simple local computations in the form of precision-weighted predictions and prediction errors. This can make this framework highly efficient, but its implementation comes with unique challenges on the software development side. Embedding such models in standard neural network libraries often becomes limiting, as these libraries' compilation and differentiation backends can force a conceptual separation between optimization algorithms and the systems being optimized. This critically departs from other biological principles such as self-monitoring, self-organisation, cellular growth and functional plasticity. In this paper, we introduce \texttt{pyhgf}: a Python package backed by JAX and Rust for creating, manipulating and sampling dynamic networks for predictive coding. We improve over other frameworks by enclosing the network components as transparent, modular and malleable variables in the message-passing steps. The resulting graphs can implement arbitrary computational complexities as beliefs propagation. But the transparency of core variables can also translate into inference processes that leverage self-organisation principles, and express structure learning, meta-learning or causal discovery as the consequence of network structural adaptation to surprising inputs. The code, tutorials and documentation are hosted at: https://github.com/ilabcode/pyhgf.
Encoding Agent Trajectories as Representations with Sequence Transformers
Authors: Athanasios Tsiligkaridis, Nicholas Kalinowski, Zhongheng Li, Elizabeth Hou
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

Spatiotemporal data faces many analogous challenges to natural language text including the ordering of locations (words) in a sequence, long range dependencies between locations, and locations having multiple meanings. In this work, we propose a novel model for representing high dimensional spatiotemporal trajectories as sequences of discrete locations and encoding them with a Transformer-based neural network architecture. Similar to language models, our Sequence Transformer for Agent Representation Encodings (STARE) model can learn representations and structure in trajectory data through both supervisory tasks (e.g., classification), and self-supervisory tasks (e.g., masked modelling). We present experimental results on various synthetic and real trajectory datasets and show that our proposed model can learn meaningful encodings that are useful for many downstream tasks including discriminating between labels and indicating similarity between locations. Using these encodings, we also learn relationships between agents and locations present in spatiotemporal data.
AI security and cyber risk in IoT systems
Authors: Petar Radanliev, David De Roure, Carsten Maple, Jason R. C. Nurse, Razvan Nicolescu, Uchenna Ani
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

We present a dependency model tailored to the context of current challenges in data strategies and make recommendations for the cybersecurity community. The model can be used for cyber risk estimation and assessment and generic risk impact assessment.
Synthetic Students: A Comparative Study of Bug Distribution Between Large Language Models and Computing Students
Authors: Stephen MacNeil, Magdalena Rogalska, Juho Leinonen, Paul Denny, Arto Hellas, Xandria Crosland
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) present an exciting opportunity for generating synthetic classroom data. Such data could include code containing a typical distribution of errors, simulated student behaviour to address the cold start problem when developing education tools, and synthetic user data when access to authentic data is restricted due to privacy reasons. In this research paper, we conduct a comparative study examining the distribution of bugs generated by LLMs in contrast to those produced by computing students. Leveraging data from two previous large-scale analyses of student-generated bugs, we investigate whether LLMs can be coaxed to exhibit bug patterns that are similar to authentic student bugs when prompted to inject errors into code. The results suggest that unguided, LLMs do not generate plausible error distributions, and many of the generated errors are unlikely to be generated by real students. However, with guidance including descriptions of common errors and typical frequencies, LLMs can be shepherded to generate realistic distributions of errors in synthetic code.
Automated Rewards via LLM-Generated Progress Functions
Authors: Vishnu Sarukkai, Brennan Shacklett, Zander Majercik, Kush Bhatia, Christopher Ré, Kayvon Fatahalian
Date: 2024-10-11 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to automate reward engineering by leveraging their broad domain knowledge across various tasks. However, they often need many iterations of trial-and-error to generate effective reward functions. This process is costly because evaluating every sampled reward function requires completing the full policy optimization process for each function. In this paper, we introduce an LLM-driven reward generation framework that is able to produce state-of-the-art policies on the challenging Bi-DexHands benchmark with 20x fewer reward function samples than the prior state-of-the-art work. Our key insight is that we reduce the problem of generating task-specific rewards to the problem of coarsely estimating task progress. Our two-step solution leverages the task domain knowledge and the code synthesis abilities of LLMs to author progress functions that estimate task progress from a given state. Then, we use this notion of progress to discretize states, and generate count-based intrinsic rewards using the low-dimensional state space. We show that the combination of LLM-generated progress functions and count-based intrinsic rewards is essential for our performance gains, while alternatives such as generic hash-based counts or using progress directly as a reward function fall short.