pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Automating Chapter-Level Classification for Electronic Theses and Dissertations
Authors: Bipasha Banerjee, William A. Ingram, Edward A. Fox
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

Traditional archival practices for describing electronic theses and dissertations (ETDs) rely on broad, high-level metadata schemes that fail to capture the depth, complexity, and interdisciplinary nature of these long scholarly works. The lack of detailed, chapter-level content descriptions impedes researchers' ability to locate specific sections or themes, thereby reducing discoverability and overall accessibility. By providing chapter-level metadata information, we improve the effectiveness of ETDs as research resources. This makes it easier for scholars to navigate them efficiently and extract valuable insights. The absence of such metadata further obstructs interdisciplinary research by obscuring connections across fields, hindering new academic discoveries and collaboration. In this paper, we propose a machine learning and AI-driven solution to automatically categorize ETD chapters. This solution is intended to improve discoverability and promote understanding of chapters. Our approach enriches traditional archival practices by providing context-rich descriptions that facilitate targeted navigation and improved access. We aim to support interdisciplinary research and make ETDs more accessible. By providing chapter-level classification labels and using them to index in our developed prototype system, we make content in ETD chapters more discoverable and usable for a diverse range of scholarly needs. Implementing this AI-enhanced approach allows archives to serve researchers better, enabling efficient access to relevant information and supporting deeper engagement with ETDs. This will increase the impact of ETDs as research tools, foster interdisciplinary exploration, and reinforce the role of archives in scholarly communication within the data-intensive academic landscape.
Mixed-State Quantum Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Model
Authors: Gino Kwun, Bingzhi Zhang, Quntao Zhuang
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, model, Quantum Machine Learning

Generative quantum machine learning has gained significant attention for its ability to produce quantum states with desired distributions. Among various quantum generative models, quantum denoising diffusion probabilistic models (QuDDPMs) [Phys. Rev. Lett. 132, 100602 (2024)] provide a promising approach with stepwise learning that resolves the training issues. However, the requirement of high-fidelity scrambling unitaries in QuDDPM poses a challenge in near-term implementation. We propose the \textit{mixed-state quantum denoising diffusion probabilistic model} (MSQuDDPM) to eliminate the need for scrambling unitaries. Our approach focuses on adapting the quantum noise channels to the model architecture, which integrates depolarizing noise channels in the forward diffusion process and parameterized quantum circuits with projective measurements in the backward denoising steps. We also introduce several techniques to improve MSQuDDPM, including a cosine-exponent schedule of noise interpolation, the use of single-qubit random ancilla, and superfidelity-based cost functions to enhance the convergence. We evaluate MSQuDDPM on quantum ensemble generation tasks, demonstrating its successful performance.
Making History Readable
Authors: Bipasha Banerjee, Jennifer Goyne, William A. Ingram
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Handwriting Recognition, Navigate

The Virginia Tech University Libraries (VTUL) Digital Library Platform (DLP) hosts digital collections that offer our users access to a wide variety of documents of historical and cultural importance. These collections are not only of academic importance but also provide our users with a glance at local historical events. Our DLP contains collections comprising digital objects featuring complex layouts, faded imagery, and hard-to-read handwritten text, which makes providing online access to these materials challenging. To address these issues, we integrate AI into our DLP workflow and convert the text in the digital objects into a machine-readable format. To enhance the user experience with our historical collections, we use custom AI agents for handwriting recognition, text extraction, and large language models (LLMs) for summarization. This poster highlights three collections focusing on handwritten letters, newspapers, and digitized topographic maps. We discuss the challenges with each collection and detail our approaches to address them. Our proposed methods aim to enhance the user experience by making the contents in these collections easier to search and navigate.
Agentic AI for Improving Precision in Identifying Contributions to Sustainable Development Goals
Authors: William A. Ingram, Bipasha Banerjee, Edward A. Fox
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Retrieval

As research institutions increasingly commit to supporting the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), there is a pressing need to accurately assess their research output against these goals. Current approaches, primarily reliant on keyword-based Boolean search queries, conflate incidental keyword matches with genuine contributions, reducing retrieval precision and complicating benchmarking efforts. This study investigates the application of autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs) as evaluation agents to identify relevant scholarly contributions to SDG targets in scholarly publications. Using a dataset of academic abstracts retrieved via SDG-specific keyword queries, we demonstrate that small, locally-hosted LLMs can differentiate semantically relevant contributions to SDG targets from documents retrieved due to incidental keyword matches, addressing the limitations of traditional methods. By leveraging the contextual understanding of LLMs, this approach provides a scalable framework for improving SDG-related research metrics and informing institutional reporting.
What Differentiates Educational Literature? A Multimodal Fusion Approach of Transformers and Computational Linguistics
Authors: Jordan J. Bird
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, text-classification, Text Classification

The integration of new literature into the English curriculum remains a challenge since educators often lack scalable tools to rapidly evaluate readability and adapt texts for diverse classroom needs. This study proposes to address this gap through a multimodal approach that combines transformer-based text classification with linguistic feature analysis to align texts with UK Key Stages. Eight state-of-the-art Transformers were fine-tuned on segmented text data, with BERT achieving the highest unimodal F1 score of 0.75. In parallel, 500 deep neural network topologies were searched for the classification of linguistic characteristics, achieving an F1 score of 0.392. The fusion of these modalities shows a significant improvement, with every multimodal approach outperforming all unimodal models. In particular, the ELECTRA Transformer fused with the neural network achieved an F1 score of 0.996. Unimodal and multimodal approaches are shown to have statistically significant differences in all validation metrics (accuracy, precision, recall, F1 score) except for inference time. The proposed approach is finally encapsulated in a stakeholder-facing web application, providing non-technical stakeholder access to real-time insights on text complexity, reading difficulty, curriculum alignment, and recommendations for learning age range. The application empowers data-driven decision making and reduces manual workload by integrating AI-based recommendations into lesson planning for English literature.
Learning Explainable Treatment Policies with Clinician-Informed Representations: A Practical Approach
Authors: Johannes O. Ferstad, Emily B. Fox, David Scheinker, Ramesh Johari
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

Digital health interventions (DHIs) and remote patient monitoring (RPM) have shown great potential in improving chronic disease management through personalized care. However, barriers like limited efficacy and workload concerns hinder adoption of existing DHIs; while limited sample sizes and lack of interpretability limit the effectiveness and adoption of purely black-box algorithmic DHIs. In this paper, we address these challenges by developing a pipeline for learning explainable treatment policies for RPM-enabled DHIs. We apply our approach in the real-world setting of RPM using a DHI to improve glycemic control of youth with type 1 diabetes. Our main contribution is to reveal the importance of clinical domain knowledge in developing state and action representations for effective, efficient, and interpretable targeting policies. We observe that policies learned from clinician-informed representations are significantly more efficacious and efficient than policies learned from black-box representations. This work emphasizes the importance of collaboration between ML researchers and clinicians for developing effective DHIs in the real world.
A Bilayer Segmentation-Recombination Network for Accurate Segmentation of Overlapping C. elegans
Authors: Mengqian Dinga, Jun Liua, Yang Luo, Jinshan Tang
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Caenorhabditis elegans (C. elegans) is an excellent model organism because of its short lifespan and high degree of homology with human genes, and it has been widely used in a variety of human health and disease models. However, the segmentation of C. elegans remains challenging due to the following reasons: 1) the activity trajectory of C. elegans is uncontrollable, and multiple nematodes often overlap, resulting in blurred boundaries of C. elegans. This makes it impossible to clearly study the life trajectory of a certain nematode; and 2) in the microscope images of overlapping C. elegans, the translucent tissues at the edges obscure each other, leading to inaccurate boundary segmentation. To solve these problems, a Bilayer Segmentation-Recombination Network (BR-Net) for the segmentation of C. elegans instances is proposed. The network consists of three parts: A Coarse Mask Segmentation Module (CMSM), a Bilayer Segmentation Module (BSM), and a Semantic Consistency Recombination Module (SCRM). The CMSM is used to extract the coarse mask, and we introduce a Unified Attention Module (UAM) in CMSM to make CMSM better aware of nematode instances. The Bilayer Segmentation Module (BSM) segments the aggregated C. elegans into overlapping and non-overlapping regions. This is followed by integration by the SCRM, where semantic consistency regularization is introduced to segment nematode instances more accurately. Finally, the effectiveness of the method is verified on the C. elegans dataset. The experimental results show that BR-Net exhibits good competitiveness and outperforms other recently proposed instance segmentation methods in processing C. elegans occlusion images.
Rapid Deployment of Domain-specific Hyperspectral Image Processors with Application to Autonomous Driving
Authors: Jon Gutiérrez-Zaballa, Koldo Basterretxea, Javier Echanobe, Óscar Mata-Carballeira, M. Victoria Martínez
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Quantization, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

The article discusses the use of low cost System-On-Module (SOM) platforms for the implementation of efficient hyperspectral imaging (HSI) processors for application in autonomous driving. The work addresses the challenges of shaping and deploying multiple layer fully convolutional networks (FCN) for low-latency, on-board image semantic segmentation using resource- and power-constrained processing devices. The paper describes in detail the steps followed to redesign and customize a successfully trained HSI segmentation lightweight FCN that was previously tested on a high-end heterogeneous multiprocessing system-on-chip (MPSoC) to accommodate it to the constraints imposed by a low-cost SOM. This SOM features a lower-end but much cheaper MPSoC suitable for the deployment of automatic driving systems (ADS). In particular the article reports the data- and hardware-specific quantization techniques utilized to fit the FCN into a commercial fixed-point programmable AI coprocessor IP, and proposes a full customized post-training quantization scheme to reduce computation and storage costs without compromising segmentation accuracy.
AI-Augmented Ethical Hacking: A Practical Examination of Manual Exploitation and Privilege Escalation in Linux Environments
Authors: Haitham S. Al-Sinani, Chris J. Mitchell
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

This study explores the application of generative AI (GenAI) within manual exploitation and privilege escalation tasks in Linux-based penetration testing environments, two areas critical to comprehensive cybersecurity assessments. Building on previous research into the role of GenAI in the ethical hacking lifecycle, this paper presents a hands-on experimental analysis conducted in a controlled virtual setup to evaluate the utility of GenAI in supporting these crucial, often manual, tasks. Our findings demonstrate that GenAI can streamline processes, such as identifying potential attack vectors and parsing complex outputs for sensitive data during privilege escalation. The study also identifies key benefits and challenges associated with GenAI, including enhanced efficiency and scalability, alongside ethical concerns related to data privacy, unintended discovery of vulnerabilities, and potential for misuse. This work contributes to the growing field of AI-assisted cybersecurity by emphasising the importance of human-AI collaboration, especially in contexts requiring careful decision-making, rather than the complete replacement of human input.
HSI-Drive v2.0: More Data for New Challenges in Scene Understanding for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Jon Gutiérrez-Zaballa, Koldo Basterretxea, Javier Echanobe, M. Victoria Martínez, Unai Martínez-Corral
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Image Segmentation, Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation

We present the updated version of the HSI-Drive dataset aimed at developing automated driving systems (ADS) using hyperspectral imaging (HSI). The v2.0 version includes new annotated images from videos recorded during winter and fall in real driving scenarios. Added to the spring and summer images included in the previous v1.1 version, the new dataset contains 752 images covering the four seasons. In this paper, we show the improvements achieved over previously published results obtained on the v1.1 dataset, showcasing the enhanced performance of models trained on the new v2.0 dataset. We also show the progress made in comprehensive scene understanding by experimenting with more capable image segmentation models. These models include new segmentation categories aimed at the identification of essential road safety objects such as the presence of vehicles and road signs, as well as highly vulnerable groups like pedestrians and cyclists. In addition, we provide evidence of the performance and robustness of the models when applied to segmenting HSI video sequences captured in various environments and conditions. Finally, for a correct assessment of the results described in this work, the constraints imposed by the processing platforms that can sensibly be deployed in vehicles for ADS must be taken into account. Thus, and although implementation details are out of the scope of this paper, we focus our research on the development of computationally efficient, lightweight ML models that can eventually operate at high throughput rates. The dataset and some examples of segmented videos are available in https://ipaccess.ehu.eus/HSI-Drive/.
On Statistical Rates of Conditional Diffusion Transformers: Approximation, Estimation and Minimax Optimality
Authors: Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Weimin Wu, Yi-Chen Lee, Yu-Chao Huang, Minshuo Chen, Han Liu
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00

We investigate the approximation and estimation rates of conditional diffusion transformers (DiTs) with classifier-free guidance. We present a comprehensive analysis for ``in-context'' conditional DiTs under four common data assumptions. We show that both conditional DiTs and their latent variants lead to the minimax optimality of unconditional DiTs under identified settings. Specifically, we discretize the input domains into infinitesimal grids and then perform a term-by-term Taylor expansion on the conditional diffusion score function under H\"older smooth data assumption. This enables fine-grained use of transformers' universal approximation through a more detailed piecewise constant approximation and hence obtains tighter bounds. Additionally, we extend our analysis to the latent setting under the linear latent subspace assumption. We not only show that latent conditional DiTs achieve lower bounds than conditional DiTs both in approximation and estimation, but also show the minimax optimality of latent unconditional DiTs. Our findings establish statistical limits for conditional and unconditional DiTs, and offer practical guidance toward developing more efficient and accurate DiT models.
Inference Scaling fLaws: The Limits of LLM Resampling with Imperfect Verifiers
Authors: Benedikt Stroebl, Sayash Kapoor, Arvind Narayanan
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: HumanEval, mbpp

Recent research has generated hope that inference scaling could allow weaker language models to match or exceed the accuracy of stronger models, such as by repeatedly sampling solutions to a coding problem until it passes unit tests. The central thesis of this paper is that there is no free lunch for inference scaling: indefinite accuracy improvement through resampling can only be realized if the "verifier" (in this case, a set of unit tests) is perfect. When the verifier is imperfect, as it almost always is in domains such as reasoning or coding (for example, unit tests have imperfect coverage), there is a nonzero probability of false positives: incorrect solutions that pass the verifier. Resampling cannot decrease this probability, so it imposes an upper bound to the accuracy of resampling-based inference scaling even with an infinite compute budget. We find that there is a very strong correlation between the model's single-sample accuracy (i.e. accuracy without unit tests) and its false positive rate on coding benchmarks HumanEval and MBPP, whose unit tests have limited coverage. Therefore, no amount of inference scaling of weaker models can enable them to match the single-sample accuracy of a sufficiently strong model (Fig. 1a). When we consider that false positives have a negative utility compared to abstaining from producing a solution, it bends the inference scaling curve further downward. Empirically, we find that the optimal number of samples can be less than 10 under realistic assumptions (Fig. 1b). Finally, we show that beyond accuracy, false positives may have other undesirable qualities, such as poor adherence to coding style conventions.
What's in the Image? A Deep-Dive into the Vision of Vision Language Models
Authors: Omri Kaduri, Shai Bagon, Tali Dekel
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Attribute, Descriptive

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have recently demonstrated remarkable capabilities in comprehending complex visual content. However, the mechanisms underlying how VLMs process visual information remain largely unexplored. In this paper, we conduct a thorough empirical analysis, focusing on attention modules across layers. We reveal several key insights about how these models process visual data: (i) the internal representation of the query tokens (e.g., representations of "describe the image"), is utilized by VLMs to store global image information; we demonstrate that these models generate surprisingly descriptive responses solely from these tokens, without direct access to image tokens. (ii) Cross-modal information flow is predominantly influenced by the middle layers (approximately 25% of all layers), while early and late layers contribute only marginally.(iii) Fine-grained visual attributes and object details are directly extracted from image tokens in a spatially localized manner, i.e., the generated tokens associated with a specific object or attribute attend strongly to their corresponding regions in the image. We propose novel quantitative evaluation to validate our observations, leveraging real-world complex visual scenes. Finally, we demonstrate the potential of our findings in facilitating efficient visual processing in state-of-the-art VLMs.
Puzzle Similarity: A Perceptually-guided Cross-Reference Metric for Artifact Detection in 3D Scene Reconstructions
Authors: Nicolai Hermann, Jorge Condor, Piotr Didyk
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Artifact Detection, Image Restoration

Modern reconstruction techniques can effectively model complex 3D scenes from sparse 2D views. However, automatically assessing the quality of novel views and identifying artifacts is challenging due to the lack of ground truth images and the limitations of No-Reference image metrics in predicting reliable artifact maps. The absence of such metrics hinders the assessment of the quality of novel views and limits the adoption of post-processing techniques, such as inpainting, to enhance reconstruction quality. To tackle this, recent work has established a new category of metrics (Cross-Reference), predicting image quality solely by leveraging context from alternate viewpoint captures (arXiv:2404.14409). In this work, we propose a new Cross-Reference metric, Puzzle Similarity, which is designed to localize artifacts in novel views. Our approach utilizes image patch statistics from the input views to establish a scene-specific distribution, later used to identify poorly reconstructed regions in the novel views. Given the lack of good measures to evaluate Cross-Reference methods in the context of 3D reconstruction, we collected a novel human-labeled dataset of artifact and distortion maps in unseen reconstructed views. Through this dataset, we demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art localization of artifacts in novel views, correlating with human assessment, even without aligned references. We can leverage our new metric to enhance applications like automatic image restoration, guided acquisition, or 3D reconstruction from sparse inputs. Find the project page at https://nihermann.github.io/puzzlesim/ .