pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FedEval-LLM: Federated Evaluation of Large Language Models on Downstream Tasks with Collective Wisdom
Authors: Yuanqin He, Yan Kang, Lixin Fan, Qiang Yang
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising solution for collaborative training of large language models (LLMs). However, the integration of LLMs into FL introduces new challenges, particularly concerning the evaluation of LLMs. Traditional evaluation methods that rely on labeled test sets and similarity-based metrics cover only a subset of the acceptable answers, thereby failing to accurately reflect the performance of LLMs on generative tasks. Meanwhile, although automatic evaluation methods that leverage advanced LLMs present potential, they face critical risks of data leakage due to the need to transmit data to external servers and suboptimal performance on downstream tasks due to the lack of domain knowledge. To address these issues, we propose a Federated Evaluation framework of Large Language Models, named FedEval-LLM, that provides reliable performance measurements of LLMs on downstream tasks without the reliance on labeled test sets and external tools, thus ensuring strong privacy-preserving capability. FedEval-LLM leverages a consortium of personalized LLMs from participants as referees to provide domain knowledge and collective evaluation capability, thus aligning to the respective downstream tasks and mitigating uncertainties and biases associated with a single referee. Experimental results demonstrate a significant improvement in the evaluation capability of personalized evaluation models on downstream tasks. When applied to FL, these evaluation models exhibit strong agreement with human preference and RougeL-score on meticulously curated test sets. FedEval-LLM effectively overcomes the limitations of traditional metrics and the reliance on external services, making it a promising framework for the evaluation of LLMs within collaborative training scenarios.
Who Validates the Validators? Aligning LLM-Assisted Evaluation of LLM Outputs with Human Preferences
Authors: Shreya Shankar, J. D. Zamfirescu-Pereira, Björn Hartmann, Aditya G. Parameswaran, Ian Arawjo
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00

Due to the cumbersome nature of human evaluation and limitations of code-based evaluation, Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to assist humans in evaluating LLM outputs. Yet LLM-generated evaluators simply inherit all the problems of the LLMs they evaluate, requiring further human validation. We present a mixed-initiative approach to ``validate the validators'' -- aligning LLM-generated evaluation functions (be it prompts or code) with human requirements. Our interface, EvalGen, provides automated assistance to users in generating evaluation criteria and implementing assertions. While generating candidate implementations (Python functions, LLM grader prompts), EvalGen asks humans to grade a subset of LLM outputs; this feedback is used to select implementations that better align with user grades. A qualitative study finds overall support for EvalGen but underscores the subjectivity and iterative process of alignment. In particular, we identify a phenomenon we dub \emph{criteria drift}: users need criteria to grade outputs, but grading outputs helps users define criteria. What is more, some criteria appears \emph{dependent} on the specific LLM outputs observed (rather than independent criteria that can be defined \emph{a priori}), raising serious questions for approaches that assume the independence of evaluation from observation of model outputs. We present our interface and implementation details, a comparison of our algorithm with a baseline approach, and implications for the design of future LLM evaluation assistants.
Physics-integrated generative modeling using attentive planar normalizing flow based variational autoencoder
Authors: Sheikh Waqas Akhtar
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00

Physics-integrated generative modeling is a class of hybrid or grey-box modeling in which we augment the the data-driven model with the physics knowledge governing the data distribution. The use of physics knowledge allows the generative model to produce output in a controlled way, so that the output, by construction, complies with the physical laws. It imparts improved generalization ability to extrapolate beyond the training distribution as well as improved interpretability because the model is partly grounded in firm domain knowledge. In this work, we aim to improve the fidelity of reconstruction and robustness to noise in the physics integrated generative model. To this end, we use variational-autoencoder as a generative model. To improve the reconstruction results of the decoder, we propose to learn the latent posterior distribution of both the physics as well as the trainable data-driven components using planar normalizng flow. Normalizng flow based posterior distribution harnesses the inherent dynamical structure of the data distribution, hence the learned model gets closer to the true underlying data distribution. To improve the robustness of generative model against noise injected in the model, we propose a modification in the encoder part of the normalizing flow based VAE. We designed the encoder to incorporate scaled dot product attention based contextual information in the noisy latent vector which will mitigate the adverse effect of noise in the latent vector and make the model more robust. We empirically evaluated our models on human locomotion dataset [33] and the results validate the efficacy of our proposed models in terms of improvement in reconstruction quality as well as robustness against noise injected in the model.
Concept Induction: Analyzing Unstructured Text with High-Level Concepts Using LLooM
Authors: Michelle S. Lam, Janice Teoh, James Landay, Jeffrey Heer, Michael S. Bernstein
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Topic Models

Data analysts have long sought to turn unstructured text data into meaningful concepts. Though common, topic modeling and clustering focus on lower-level keywords and require significant interpretative work. We introduce concept induction, a computational process that instead produces high-level concepts, defined by explicit inclusion criteria, from unstructured text. For a dataset of toxic online comments, where a state-of-the-art BERTopic model outputs "women, power, female," concept induction produces high-level concepts such as "Criticism of traditional gender roles" and "Dismissal of women's concerns." We present LLooM, a concept induction algorithm that leverages large language models to iteratively synthesize sampled text and propose human-interpretable concepts of increasing generality. We then instantiate LLooM in a mixed-initiative text analysis tool, enabling analysts to shift their attention from interpreting topics to engaging in theory-driven analysis. Through technical evaluations and four analysis scenarios ranging from literature review to content moderation, we find that LLooM's concepts improve upon the prior art of topic models in terms of quality and data coverage. In expert case studies, LLooM helped researchers to uncover new insights even from familiar datasets, for example by suggesting a previously unnoticed concept of attacks on out-party stances in a political social media dataset.
Food Portion Estimation via 3D Object Scaling
Authors: Gautham Vinod, Jiangpeng He, Zeman Shao, Fengqing Zhu
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Image-based methods to analyze food images have alleviated the user burden and biases associated with traditional methods. However, accurate portion estimation remains a major challenge due to the loss of 3D information in the 2D representation of foods captured by smartphone cameras or wearable devices. In this paper, we propose a new framework to estimate both food volume and energy from 2D images by leveraging the power of 3D food models and physical reference in the eating scene. Our method estimates the pose of the camera and the food object in the input image and recreates the eating occasion by rendering an image of a 3D model of the food with the estimated poses. We also introduce a new dataset, SimpleFood45, which contains 2D images of 45 food items and associated annotations including food volume, weight, and energy. Our method achieves an average error of 31.10 kCal (17.67%) on this dataset, outperforming existing portion estimation methods. The dataset can be accessed at: https://lorenz.ecn.purdue.edu/~gvinod/simplefood45/ and the code can be accessed at: https://gitlab.com/viper-purdue/monocular-food-volume-3d
An Online Spatial-Temporal Graph Trajectory Planner for Autonomous Vehicles
Authors: Jilan Samiuddin, Benoit Boulet, Di wu
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles

The autonomous driving industry is expected to grow by over 20 times in the coming decade and, thus, motivate researchers to delve into it. The primary focus of their research is to ensure safety, comfort, and efficiency. An autonomous vehicle has several modules responsible for one or more of the aforementioned items. Among these modules, the trajectory planner plays a pivotal role in the safety of the vehicle and the comfort of its passengers. The module is also responsible for respecting kinematic constraints and any applicable road constraints. In this paper, a novel online spatial-temporal graph trajectory planner is introduced to generate safe and comfortable trajectories. First, a spatial-temporal graph is constructed using the autonomous vehicle, its surrounding vehicles, and virtual nodes along the road with respect to the vehicle itself. Next, the graph is forwarded into a sequential network to obtain the desired states. To support the planner, a simple behavioral layer is also presented that determines kinematic constraints for the planner. Furthermore, a novel potential function is also proposed to train the network. Finally, the proposed planner is tested on three different complex driving tasks, and the performance is compared with two frequently used methods. The results show that the proposed planner generates safe and feasible trajectories while achieving similar or longer distances in the forward direction and comparable comfort ride.
A Time-Inhomogeneous Markov Model for Resource Availability under Sparse Observations
Authors: Lukas Rottkamp, Matthias Schubert
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00

Accurate spatio-temporal information about the current situation is crucial for smart city applications such as modern routing algorithms. Often, this information describes the state of stationary resources, e.g. the availability of parking bays, charging stations or the amount of people waiting for a vehicle to pick them up near a given location. To exploit this kind of information, predicting future states of the monitored resources is often mandatory because a resource might change its state within the time until it is needed. To train an accurate predictive model, it is often not possible to obtain a continuous time series on the state of the resource. For example, the information might be collected from traveling agents visiting the resource with an irregular frequency. Thus, it is necessary to develop methods which work on sparse observations for training and prediction. In this paper, we propose time-inhomogeneous discrete Markov models to allow accurate prediction even when the frequency of observation is very rare. Our new model is able to blend recent observations with historic data and also provide useful probabilistic estimates for future states. Since resources availability in a city is typically time-dependent, our Markov model is time-inhomogeneous and cyclic within a predefined time interval. To train our model, we propose a modified Baum-Welch algorithm. Evaluations on real-world datasets of parking bay availability show that our new method indeed yields good results compared to methods being trained on complete data and non-cyclic variants.
De-DSI: Decentralised Differentiable Search Index
Authors: Petru Neague, Marcel Gregoriadis, Johan Pouwelse
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Retrieval

This study introduces De-DSI, a novel framework that fuses large language models (LLMs) with genuine decentralization for information retrieval, particularly employing the differentiable search index (DSI) concept in a decentralized setting. Focused on efficiently connecting novel user queries with document identifiers without direct document access, De-DSI operates solely on query-docid pairs. To enhance scalability, an ensemble of DSI models is introduced, where the dataset is partitioned into smaller shards for individual model training. This approach not only maintains accuracy by reducing the number of data each model needs to handle but also facilitates scalability by aggregating outcomes from multiple models. This aggregation uses a beam search to identify top docids and applies a softmax function for score normalization, selecting documents with the highest scores for retrieval. The decentralized implementation demonstrates that retrieval success is comparable to centralized methods, with the added benefit of the possibility of distributing computational complexity across the network. This setup also allows for the retrieval of multimedia items through magnet links, eliminating the need for platforms or intermediaries.
CausalMed: Causality-Based Personalized Medication Recommendation Centered on Patient health state
Authors: Xiang Li, Shunpan Liang, Yu Lei, Chen Li, Yulei Hou, Tengfei Ma
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Causal Inference, Recommendation Systems

Medication recommendation systems are developed to recommend suitable medications tailored to specific patient. Previous researches primarily focus on learning medication representations, which have yielded notable advances. However, these methods are limited to capturing personalized patient representations due to the following primary limitations: (i) unable to capture the differences in the impact of diseases/procedures on patients across various patient health states; (ii) fail to model the direct causal relationships between medications and specific health state of patients, resulting in an inability to determine which specific disease each medication is treating. To address these limitations, we propose CausalMed, a patient health state-centric model capable of enhancing the personalization of patient representations. Specifically, CausalMed first captures the causal relationship between diseases/procedures and medications through causal discovery and evaluates their causal effects. Building upon this, CausalMed focuses on analyzing the health state of patients, capturing the dynamic differences of diseases/procedures in different health states of patients, and transforming diseases/procedures into medications on direct causal relationships. Ultimately, CausalMed integrates information from longitudinal visits to recommend medication combinations. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets show that our method learns more personalized patient representation and outperforms state-of-the-art models in accuracy and safety.
An Adaptive Metaheuristic Framework for Changing Environments
Authors: Bestoun S. Ahmed
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

The rapidly changing landscapes of modern optimization problems require algorithms that can be adapted in real-time. This paper introduces an Adaptive Metaheuristic Framework (AMF) designed for dynamic environments. It is capable of intelligently adapting to changes in the problem parameters. The AMF combines a dynamic representation of problems, a real-time sensing system, and adaptive techniques to navigate continuously changing optimization environments. Through a simulated dynamic optimization problem, the AMF's capability is demonstrated to detect environmental changes and proactively adjust its search strategy. This framework utilizes a differential evolution algorithm that is improved with an adaptation module that adjusts solutions in response to detected changes. The capability of the AMF to adjust is tested through a series of iterations, demonstrating its resilience and robustness in sustaining solution quality despite the problem's development. The effectiveness of AMF is demonstrated through a series of simulations on a dynamic optimization problem. Robustness and agility characterize the algorithm's performance, as evidenced by the presented fitness evolution and solution path visualizations. The findings show that AMF is a practical solution to dynamic optimization and a major step forward in the creation of algorithms that can handle the unpredictability of real-world problems.
How to Benchmark Vision Foundation Models for Semantic Segmentation?
Authors: Tommie Kerssies, Daan de Geus, Gijs Dubbelman
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Decoder, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recent vision foundation models (VFMs) have demonstrated proficiency in various tasks but require supervised fine-tuning to perform the task of semantic segmentation effectively. Benchmarking their performance is essential for selecting current models and guiding future model developments for this task. The lack of a standardized benchmark complicates comparisons. Therefore, the primary objective of this paper is to study how VFMs should be benchmarked for semantic segmentation. To do so, various VFMs are fine-tuned under various settings, and the impact of individual settings on the performance ranking and training time is assessed. Based on the results, the recommendation is to fine-tune the ViT-B variants of VFMs with a 16x16 patch size and a linear decoder, as these settings are representative of using a larger model, more advanced decoder and smaller patch size, while reducing training time by more than 13 times. Using multiple datasets for training and evaluation is also recommended, as the performance ranking across datasets and domain shifts varies. Linear probing, a common practice for some VFMs, is not recommended, as it is not representative of end-to-end fine-tuning. The benchmarking setup recommended in this paper enables a performance analysis of VFMs for semantic segmentation. The findings of such an analysis reveal that pretraining with promptable segmentation is not beneficial, whereas masked image modeling (MIM) with abstract representations is crucial, even more important than the type of supervision used. The code for efficiently fine-tuning VFMs for semantic segmentation can be accessed through the project page at: https://tue-mps.github.io/benchmark-vfm-ss/.
Real-World Efficient Blind Motion Deblurring via Blur Pixel Discretization
Authors: Insoo Kim, Jae Seok Choi, Geonseok Seo, Kinam Kwon, Jinwoo Shin, Hyong-Euk Lee
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 4k, Deblurring, regression

As recent advances in mobile camera technology have enabled the capability to capture high-resolution images, such as 4K images, the demand for an efficient deblurring model handling large motion has increased. In this paper, we discover that the image residual errors, i.e., blur-sharp pixel differences, can be grouped into some categories according to their motion blur type and how complex their neighboring pixels are. Inspired by this, we decompose the deblurring (regression) task into blur pixel discretization (pixel-level blur classification) and discrete-to-continuous conversion (regression with blur class map) tasks. Specifically, we generate the discretized image residual errors by identifying the blur pixels and then transform them to a continuous form, which is computationally more efficient than naively solving the original regression problem with continuous values. Here, we found that the discretization result, i.e., blur segmentation map, remarkably exhibits visual similarity with the image residual errors. As a result, our efficient model shows comparable performance to state-of-the-art methods in realistic benchmarks, while our method is up to 10 times computationally more efficient.
AccidentBlip: Agent of Accident Warning based on MA-former
Authors: Yihua Shao, Yeling Xu, Xinwei Long, Siyu Chen, Ziyang Yan, Yang Yang, Haoting Liu, Yan Wang, Hao Tang, Zhen Lei
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Reasoning, Scene Understanding

In complex transportation systems, accurately sensing the surrounding environment and predicting the risk of potential accidents is crucial. Most existing accident prediction methods are based on temporal neural networks, such as RNN and LSTM. Recent multimodal fusion approaches improve vehicle localization through 3D target detection and assess potential risks by calculating inter-vehicle distances. However, these temporal networks and multimodal fusion methods suffer from limited detection robustness and high economic costs. To address these challenges, we propose AccidentBlip, a vision-only framework that employs our self-designed Motion Accident Transformer (MA-former) to process each frame of video. Unlike conventional self-attention mechanisms, MA-former replaces Q-former's self-attention with temporal attention, allowing the query corresponding to the previous frame to generate the query input for the next frame. Additionally, we introduce a residual module connection between queries of consecutive frames to enhance the model's temporal processing capabilities. For complex V2V and V2X scenarios, AccidentBlip adapts by concatenating queries from multiple cameras, effectively capturing spatial and temporal relationships. In particular, AccidentBlip achieves SOTA performance in both accident detection and prediction tasks on the DeepAccident dataset. It also outperforms current SOTA methods in V2V and V2X scenarios, demonstrating a superior capability to understand complex real-world environments.
From Form(s) to Meaning: Probing the Semantic Depths of Language Models Using Multisense Consistency
Authors: Xenia Ohmer, Elia Bruni, Dieuwke Hupkes
Date: 2024-04-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Language Modelling, Natural Language Understanding

The staggering pace with which the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are increasing, as measured by a range of commonly used natural language understanding (NLU) benchmarks, raises many questions regarding what "understanding" means for a language model and how it compares to human understanding. This is especially true since many LLMs are exclusively trained on text, casting doubt on whether their stellar benchmark performances are reflective of a true understanding of the problems represented by these benchmarks, or whether LLMs simply excel at uttering textual forms that correlate with what someone who understands the problem would say. In this philosophically inspired work, we aim to create some separation between form and meaning, with a series of tests that leverage the idea that world understanding should be consistent across presentational modes - inspired by Fregean senses - of the same meaning. Specifically, we focus on consistency across languages as well as paraphrases. Taking GPT-3.5 as our object of study, we evaluate multisense consistency across five different languages and various tasks. We start the evaluation in a controlled setting, asking the model for simple facts, and then proceed with an evaluation on four popular NLU benchmarks. We find that the model's multisense consistency is lacking and run several follow-up analyses to verify that this lack of consistency is due to a sense-dependent task understanding. We conclude that, in this aspect, the understanding of LLMs is still quite far from being consistent and human-like, and deliberate on how this impacts their utility in the context of learning about human language and understanding.