pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Leveraging Large Language Models to Geolocate Linguistic Variations in Social Media Posts
Authors: Davide Savarro, Davide Zago, Stefano Zoia
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00

Geolocalization of social media content is the task of determining the geographical location of a user based on textual data, that may show linguistic variations and informal language. In this project, we address the GeoLingIt challenge of geolocalizing tweets written in Italian by leveraging large language models (LLMs). GeoLingIt requires the prediction of both the region and the precise coordinates of the tweet. Our approach involves fine-tuning pre-trained LLMs to simultaneously predict these geolocalization aspects. By integrating innovative methodologies, we enhance the models' ability to understand the nuances of Italian social media text to improve the state-of-the-art in this domain. This work is conducted as part of the Large Language Models course at the Bertinoro International Spring School 2024. We make our code publicly available on GitHub https://github.com/dawoz/geolingit-biss2024.
Generalizing Teacher Networks for Effective Knowledge Distillation Across Student Architectures
Authors: Kuluhan Binici, Weiming Wu, Tulika Mitra
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, Transfer Learning

Knowledge distillation (KD) is a model compression method that entails training a compact student model to emulate the performance of a more complex teacher model. However, the architectural capacity gap between the two models limits the effectiveness of knowledge transfer. Addressing this issue, previous works focused on customizing teacher-student pairs to improve compatibility, a computationally expensive process that needs to be repeated every time either model changes. Hence, these methods are impractical when a teacher model has to be compressed into different student models for deployment on multiple hardware devices with distinct resource constraints. In this work, we propose Generic Teacher Network (GTN), a one-off KD-aware training to create a generic teacher capable of effectively transferring knowledge to any student model sampled from a given finite pool of architectures. To this end, we represent the student pool as a weight-sharing supernet and condition our generic teacher to align with the capacities of various student architectures sampled from this supernet. Experimental evaluation shows that our method both improves overall KD effectiveness and amortizes the minimal additional training cost of the generic teacher across students in the pool.
Enhancing Temporal Understanding in LLMs for Semi-structured Tables
Authors: Irwin Deng, Kushagra Dixit, Vivek Gupta, Dan Roth
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering

Temporal reasoning over tabular data presents substantial challenges for large language models (LLMs), as evidenced by recent research. In this study, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of temporal datasets to pinpoint the specific limitations of LLMs. Our investigation leads to enhancements in TempTabQA, a dataset specifically designed for tabular temporal question answering. We provide critical insights for improving LLM performance in temporal reasoning tasks with tabular data. Furthermore, we introduce a novel approach, C.L.E.A.R to strengthen LLM capabilities in this domain. Our findings demonstrate that our method significantly improves evidence-based reasoning across various models. Additionally, our experimental results reveal that indirect supervision with auxiliary data substantially boosts model performance in these tasks. This work contributes to a deeper understanding of LLMs' temporal reasoning abilities over tabular data and promotes advancements in their application across diverse fields.
KWT-Tiny: RISC-V Accelerated, Embedded Keyword Spotting Transformer
Authors: Aness Al-Qawlaq, Ajay Kumar M, Deepu John
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyword Spotting

This paper explores the adaptation of Transformerbased models for edge devices through the quantisation and hardware acceleration of the ARM Keyword Transformer (KWT) model on a RISC-V platform. The model was targeted to run on 64kB RAM in bare-metal C using a custom-developed edge AI library. KWT-1 was retrained to be 369 times smaller, with only a 10% loss in accuracy through reducing output classes from 35 to 2. The retraining and quantisation reduced model size from 2.42 MB to 1.65 kB. The integration of custom RISC-V instructions that accelerated GELU and SoftMax operations enabled a 5x speedup and thus ~5x power reduction in inference, with inference clock cycle counts decreasing from 26 million to 5.5 million clock cycles while incurring a small area overhead of approximately 29%. The results demonstrate a viable method for porting and accelerating Transformer-based models in low-power IoT devices.
Exploring and Addressing Reward Confusion in Offline Preference Learning
Authors: Xin Chen, Sam Toyer, Florian Shkurti
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, reinforcement-learning

Spurious correlations in a reward model's training data can prevent Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) from identifying the desired goal and induce unwanted behaviors. This paper shows that offline RLHF is susceptible to reward confusion, especially in the presence of spurious correlations in offline data. We create a benchmark to study this problem and propose a method that can significantly reduce reward confusion by leveraging transitivity of preferences while building a global preference chain with active learning.
AIDE: Antithetical, Intent-based, and Diverse Example-Based Explanations
Authors: Ikhtiyor Nematov, Dimitris Sacharidis, Tomer Sagi, Katja Hose
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Prediction, text-classification, Text Classification

For many use-cases, it is often important to explain the prediction of a black-box model by identifying the most influential training data samples. Existing approaches lack customization for user intent and often provide a homogeneous set of explanation samples, failing to reveal the model's reasoning from different angles. In this paper, we propose AIDE, an approach for providing antithetical (i.e., contrastive), intent-based, diverse explanations for opaque and complex models. AIDE distinguishes three types of explainability intents: interpreting a correct, investigating a wrong, and clarifying an ambiguous prediction. For each intent, AIDE selects an appropriate set of influential training samples that support or oppose the prediction either directly or by contrast. To provide a succinct summary, AIDE uses diversity-aware sampling to avoid redundancy and increase coverage of the training data. We demonstrate the effectiveness of AIDE on image and text classification tasks, in three ways: quantitatively, assessing correctness and continuity; qualitatively, comparing anecdotal evidence from AIDE and other example-based approaches; and via a user study, evaluating multiple aspects of AIDE. The results show that AIDE addresses the limitations of existing methods and exhibits desirable traits for an explainability method.
AI for Handball: predicting and explaining the 2024 Olympic Games tournament with Deep Learning and Large Language Models
Authors: Florian Felice
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00

Over summer 2024, the world will be looking at Paris to encourage their favorite athletes win the Olympic gold medal. In handball, few nations will fight hard to win the precious metal with speculations predicting the victory for France or Denmark for men and France or Norway for women. However, there is so far no scientific method proposed to predict the final results of the competition. In this work, we leverage a deep learning model to predict the results of the handball tournament of the 2024 Olympic Games. This model, coupled with explainable AI (xAI) techniques, allows us to extract insightful information about the main factors influencing the outcome of each match. Notably, xAI helps sports experts understand how factors like match information or individual athlete performance contribute to the predictions. Furthermore, we integrate Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate human-friendly explanations that highlight the most important factors impacting the match results. By providing human-centric explanations, our approach offers a deeper understanding of the AI predictions, making them more actionable for coaches and analysts.
A Survey of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) in Financial Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Pierre-Daniel Arsenault, Shengrui Wang, Jean-Marc Patenande
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have reached a very significant level of accuracy. While their superior performance offers considerable benefits, their inherent complexity often decreases human trust, which slows their application in high-risk decision-making domains, such as finance. The field of eXplainable AI (XAI) seeks to bridge this gap, aiming to make AI models more understandable. This survey, focusing on published work from the past five years, categorizes XAI approaches that predict financial time series. In this paper, explainability and interpretability are distinguished, emphasizing the need to treat these concepts separately as they are not applied the same way in practice. Through clear definitions, a rigorous taxonomy of XAI approaches, a complementary characterization, and examples of XAI's application in the finance industry, this paper provides a comprehensive view of XAI's current role in finance. It can also serve as a guide for selecting the most appropriate XAI approach for future applications.
An Ad-hoc graph node vector embedding algorithm for general knowledge graphs using Kinetica-Graph
Authors: B. Kaan Karamete, Eli Glaser
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: General Knowledge, Knowledge Graphs

This paper discusses how to generate general graph node embeddings from knowledge graph representations. The embedded space is composed of a number of sub-features to mimic both local affinity and remote structural relevance. These sub-feature dimensions are defined by several indicators that we speculate to catch nodal similarities, such as hop-based topological patterns, the number of overlapping labels, the transitional probabilities (markov-chain probabilities), and the cluster indices computed by our recursive spectral bisection (RSB) algorithm. These measures are flattened over the one dimensional vector space into their respective sub-component ranges such that the entire set of vector similarity functions could be used for finding similar nodes. The error is defined by the sum of pairwise square differences across a randomly selected sample of graph nodes between the assumed embeddings and the ground truth estimates as our novel loss function. The ground truth is estimated to be a combination of pairwise Jaccard similarity and the number of overlapping labels. Finally, we demonstrate a multi-variate stochastic gradient descent (SGD) algorithm to compute the weighing factors among sub-vector spaces to minimize the average error using a random sampling logic.
Enhancing Cognitive Workload Classification Using Integrated LSTM Layers and CNNs for fNIRS Data Analysis
Authors: Mehshan Ahmed Khan, Houshyar Asadi, Mohammad Reza Chalak Qazani, Adetokunbo Arogbonlo, Siamak Pedrammehr, Adnan Anwar, Asim Bhatti, Saeid Nahavandi, Chee Peng Lim
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is employed as a non-invasive method to monitor functional brain activation by capturing changes in the concentrations of oxygenated haemoglobin (HbO) and deoxygenated haemo-globin (HbR). Various machine learning classification techniques have been utilized to distinguish cognitive states. However, conventional machine learning methods, although simpler to implement, undergo a complex pre-processing phase before network training and demonstrate reduced accuracy due to inadequate data preprocessing. Additionally, previous research in cog-nitive load assessment using fNIRS has predominantly focused on differ-sizeentiating between two levels of mental workload. These studies mainly aim to classify low and high levels of cognitive load or distinguish between easy and difficult tasks. To address these limitations associated with conven-tional methods, this paper conducts a comprehensive exploration of the im-pact of Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) layers on the effectiveness of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) within deep learning models. This is to address the issues related to spatial features overfitting and lack of tem-poral dependencies in CNN in the previous studies. By integrating LSTM layers, the model can capture temporal dependencies in the fNIRS data, al-lowing for a more comprehensive understanding of cognitive states. The primary objective is to assess how incorporating LSTM layers enhances the performance of CNNs. The experimental results presented in this paper demonstrate that the integration of LSTM layers with Convolutional layers results in an increase in the accuracy of deep learning models from 97.40% to 97.92%.
Spatial-Temporal Cross-View Contrastive Pre-training for Check-in Sequence Representation Learning
Authors: Letian Gong, Huaiyu Wan, Shengnan Guo, Xiucheng Li, Yan Lin, Erwen Zheng, Tianyi Wang, Zeyu Zhou, Youfang Lin
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

The rapid growth of location-based services (LBS) has yielded massive amounts of data on human mobility. Effectively extracting meaningful representations for user-generated check-in sequences is pivotal for facilitating various downstream services. However, the user-generated check-in data are simultaneously influenced by the surrounding objective circumstances and the user's subjective intention. Specifically, the temporal uncertainty and spatial diversity exhibited in check-in data make it difficult to capture the macroscopic spatial-temporal patterns of users and to understand the semantics of user mobility activities. Furthermore, the distinct characteristics of the temporal and spatial information in check-in sequences call for an effective fusion method to incorporate these two types of information. In this paper, we propose a novel Spatial-Temporal Cross-view Contrastive Representation (STCCR) framework for check-in sequence representation learning. Specifically, STCCR addresses the above challenges by employing self-supervision from "spatial topic" and "temporal intention" views, facilitating effective fusion of spatial and temporal information at the semantic level. Besides, STCCR leverages contrastive clustering to uncover users' shared spatial topics from diverse mobility activities, while employing angular momentum contrast to mitigate the impact of temporal uncertainty and noise. We extensively evaluate STCCR on three real-world datasets and demonstrate its superior performance across three downstream tasks.
Cascaded two-stage feature clustering and selection via separability and consistency in fuzzy decision systems
Authors: Yuepeng Chen, Weiping Ding, Hengrong Ju, Jiashuang Huang, Tao Yin
Date: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Clustering, feature selection

Feature selection is a vital technique in machine learning, as it can reduce computational complexity, improve model performance, and mitigate the risk of overfitting. However, the increasing complexity and dimensionality of datasets pose significant challenges in the selection of features. Focusing on these challenges, this paper proposes a cascaded two-stage feature clustering and selection algorithm for fuzzy decision systems. In the first stage, we reduce the search space by clustering relevant features and addressing inter-feature redundancy. In the second stage, a clustering-based sequentially forward selection method that explores the global and local structure of data is presented. We propose a novel metric for assessing the significance of features, which considers both global separability and local consistency. Global separability measures the degree of intra-class cohesion and inter-class separation based on fuzzy membership, providing a comprehensive understanding of data separability. Meanwhile, local consistency leverages the fuzzy neighborhood rough set model to capture uncertainty and fuzziness in the data. The effectiveness of our proposed algorithm is evaluated through experiments conducted on 18 public datasets and a real-world schizophrenia dataset. The experiment results demonstrate our algorithm's superiority over benchmarking algorithms in both classification accuracy and the number of selected features.
CatVTON: Concatenation Is All You Need for Virtual Try-On with Diffusion Models
Authors: Zheng Chong, Xiao Dong, Haoxiang Li, Shiyue Zhang, Wenqing Zhang, Xujie Zhang, Hanqing Zhao, Xiaodan Liang
Date: 2024-07-21 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Fashion Synthesis, Image Generation, Virtual Try-on

Virtual try-on methods based on diffusion models achieve realistic try-on effects but often replicate the backbone network as a ReferenceNet or use additional image encoders to process condition inputs, leading to high training and inference costs. In this work, we rethink the necessity of ReferenceNet and image encoders and innovate the interaction between garment and person by proposing CatVTON, a simple and efficient virtual try-on diffusion model. CatVTON facilitates the seamless transfer of in-shop or worn garments of any category to target persons by simply concatenating them in spatial dimensions as inputs. The efficiency of our model is demonstrated in three aspects: (1) Lightweight network: Only the original diffusion modules are used, without additional network modules. The text encoder and cross-attentions for text injection in the backbone are removed, reducing the parameters by 167.02M. (2) Parameter-efficient training: We identified the try-on relevant modules through experiments and achieved high-quality try-on effects by training only 49.57M parameters, approximately 5.51 percent of the backbone network's parameters. (3) Simplified inference: CatVTON eliminates all unnecessary conditions and preprocessing steps, including pose estimation, human parsing, and text input, requiring only a garment reference, target person image, and mask for the virtual try-on process. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CatVTON achieves superior qualitative and quantitative results with fewer prerequisites and trainable parameters than baseline methods. Furthermore, CatVTON shows good generalization in in-the-wild scenarios despite using open-source datasets with only 73K samples.
Diff4VS: HIV-inhibiting Molecules Generation with Classifier Guidance Diffusion for Virtual Screening
Authors: Jiaqing Lyu, Changjie Chen, Bing Liang, Yijia Zhang
Date: 2024-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Design

The AIDS epidemic has killed 40 million people and caused serious global problems. The identification of new HIV-inhibiting molecules is of great importance for combating the AIDS epidemic. Here, the Classifier Guidance Diffusion model and ligand-based virtual screening strategy are combined to discover potential HIV-inhibiting molecules for the first time. We call it Diff4VS. An extra classifier is trained using the HIV molecule dataset, and the gradient of the classifier is used to guide the Diffusion to generate HIV-inhibiting molecules. Experiments show that Diff4VS can generate more candidate HIV-inhibiting molecules than other methods. Inspired by ligand-based virtual screening, a new metric DrugIndex is proposed. The DrugIndex is the ratio of the proportion of candidate drug molecules in the generated molecule to the proportion of candidate drug molecules in the training set. DrugIndex provides a new evaluation method for evolving molecular generative models from a pharmaceutical perspective. Besides, we report a new phenomenon observed when using molecule generation models for virtual screening. Compared to real molecules, the generated molecules have a lower proportion that is highly similar to known drug molecules. We call it Degradation in molecule generation. Based on the data analysis, the Degradation may result from the difficulty of generating molecules with a specific structure in the generative model. Our research contributes to the application of generative models in drug design from method, metric, and phenomenon analysis.
Decentralized Federated Anomaly Detection in Smart Grids: A P2P Gossip Approach
Authors: Muhammad Akbar Husnoo, Adnan Anwar, Md Enamul Haque, A. N. Mahmood
Date: 2024-07-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Federated Learning, Intrusion Detection, Privacy Preserving

The increasing security and privacy concerns in the Smart Grid sector have led to a significant demand for robust intrusion detection systems within critical smart grid infrastructure. To address the challenges posed by privacy preservation and decentralized power system zones with distinct data ownership, Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a promising privacy-preserving solution which facilitates collaborative training of attack detection models without necessitating the sharing of raw data. However, FL presents several implementation limitations in the power system domain due to its heavy reliance on a centralized aggregator and the risks of privacy leakage during model update transmission. To overcome these technical bottlenecks, this paper introduces a novel decentralized federated anomaly detection scheme based on two main gossip protocols namely Random Walk and Epidemic. Our findings indicate that the Random Walk protocol exhibits superior performance compared to the Epidemic protocol, highlighting its efficacy in decentralized federated learning environments. Experimental validation of the proposed framework utilizing publicly available industrial control systems datasets demonstrates superior attack detection accuracy while safeguarding data confidentiality and mitigating the impact of communication latency and stragglers. Furthermore, our approach yields a notable 35% improvement in training time compared to conventional FL, underscoring the efficacy and robustness of our decentralized learning method.
Diffusion Models for Monocular Depth Estimation: Overcoming Challenging Conditions
Authors: Fabio Tosi, Pierluigi Zama Ramirez, Matteo Poggi
Date: 2024-07-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Depth Prediction, Monocular Depth Estimation

We present a novel approach designed to address the complexities posed by challenging, out-of-distribution data in the single-image depth estimation task. Starting with images that facilitate depth prediction due to the absence of unfavorable factors, we systematically generate new, user-defined scenes with a comprehensive set of challenges and associated depth information. This is achieved by leveraging cutting-edge text-to-image diffusion models with depth-aware control, known for synthesizing high-quality image content from textual prompts while preserving the coherence of 3D structure between generated and source imagery. Subsequent fine-tuning of any monocular depth network is carried out through a self-distillation protocol that takes into account images generated using our strategy and its own depth predictions on simple, unchallenging scenes. Experiments on benchmarks tailored for our purposes demonstrate the effectiveness and versatility of our proposal.