pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Zero-Shot Open-Vocabulary Pipeline for Dialogue Understanding
Authors: Abdulfattah Safa, Gözde Gül Şahin
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue State Tracking, Dialogue Understanding, domain classification, Question Answering

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is crucial for understanding user needs and executing appropriate system actions in task-oriented dialogues. Majority of existing DST methods are designed to work within predefined ontologies and assume the availability of gold domain labels, struggling with adapting to new slots values. While Large Language Models (LLMs)-based systems show promising zero-shot DST performance, they either require extensive computational resources or they underperform existing fully-trained systems, limiting their practicality. To address these limitations, we propose a zero-shot, open-vocabulary system that integrates domain classification and DST in a single pipeline. Our approach includes reformulating DST as a question-answering task for less capable models and employing self-refining prompts for more adaptable ones. Our system does not rely on fixed slot values defined in the ontology allowing the system to adapt dynamically. We compare our approach with existing SOTA, and show that it provides up to 20% better Joint Goal Accuracy (JGA) over previous methods on datasets like Multi-WOZ 2.1, with up to 90% fewer requests to the LLM API.
Identification For Control Based on Neural Networks: Approximately Linearizable Models
Authors: Maxime Thieffry, Alexandre Hache, Mohamed Yagoubi, Philippe Chevrel
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00

This work presents a control-oriented identification scheme for efficient control design and stability analysis of nonlinear systems. Neural networks are used to identify a discrete-time nonlinear state-space model to approximate time-domain input-output behavior of a nonlinear system. The network is constructed such that the identified model is approximately linearizable by feedback, ensuring that the control law trivially follows from the learning stage. After the identification and quasi-linearization procedures, linear control theory comes at hand to design robust controllers and study stability of the closed-loop system. The effectiveness and interest of the methodology are illustrated throughout the paper on popular benchmarks for system identification.
Adaptive Learn-then-Test: Statistically Valid and Efficient Hyperparameter Selection
Authors: Matteo Zecchin, Sangwoo Park, Osvaldo Simeone
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering, valid

We introduce adaptive learn-then-test (aLTT), an efficient hyperparameter selection procedure that provides finite-sample statistical guarantees on the population risk of AI models. Unlike the existing learn-then-test (LTT) technique, which relies on conventional p-value-based multiple hypothesis testing (MHT), aLTT implements sequential data-dependent MHT with early termination by leveraging e-processes. As a result, aLTT can reduce the number of testing rounds, making it particularly well-suited for scenarios in which testing is costly or presents safety risks. Apart from maintaining statistical validity, in applications such as online policy selection for offline reinforcement learning and prompt engineering, aLTT is shown to achieve the same performance as LTT while requiring only a fraction of the testing rounds.
From Passive Watching to Active Learning: Empowering Proactive Participation in Digital Classrooms with AI Video Assistant
Authors: Anna Bodonhelyi, Enkeleda Thaqi, Süleyman Özdel, Efe Bozkir, Enkelejda Kasneci
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

In online education, innovative tools are crucial for enhancing learning outcomes. SAM (Study with AI Mentor) is an advanced platform that integrates educational videos with a context-aware chat interface powered by large language models. SAM encourages students to ask questions and explore unclear concepts in real-time, offering personalized, context-specific assistance, including explanations of formulas, slides, and images. In a crowdsourced user study involving 140 participants, SAM was evaluated through pre- and post-knowledge tests, comparing a group using SAM with a control group. The results demonstrated that SAM users achieved greater knowledge gains, with a 96.8% answer accuracy. Participants also provided positive feedback on SAM's usability and effectiveness. SAM's proactive approach to learning not only enhances learning outcomes but also empowers students to take full ownership of their educational experience, representing a promising future direction for online learning tools.
60 Data Points are Sufficient to Fine-Tune LLMs for Question-Answering
Authors: Junjie Ye, Yuming Yang, Qi Zhang, Tao Gui, Xuanjing Huang, Peng Wang, Zhongchao shi, Jianping Fan
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, World Knowledge

Large language models (LLMs) encode extensive world knowledge through pre-training on massive datasets, which can then be fine-tuned for the question-answering (QA) task. However, effective strategies for fine-tuning LLMs for the QA task remain largely unexplored. To address this gap, we categorize supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data based on the extent of knowledge memorized by the pretrained LLMs and conduct a series of empirical analyses. Our experiments, involving four LLMs from three different model families, focus on three key factors: the amount of data required for SFT, the impact of different SFT datasets on model performance, and how data requirements vary across LLMs. The results show that as few as 60 data points during the SFT stage can activate the knowledge encoded during pre-training, enabling LLMs to perform the QA task. Additionally, SFT with data of varying memory levels has a significant impact on LLM performance, with the optimal dataset differing based on the specific model being fine-tuned. Future research will delve deeper into the mechanisms underlying these phenomena.
SwiftDossier: Tailored Automatic Dossier for Drug Discovery with LLMs and Agents
Authors: Gabriele Fossi, Youssef Boulaimen, Leila Outemzabet, Nathalie Jeanray, Stephane Gerart, Sebastien Vachenc, Joanna Giemza, Salvatore Raieli
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, RAG

The advancement of artificial intelligence algorithms has expanded their application to several fields such as the biomedical domain. Artificial intelligence systems, including Large Language Models (LLMs), can be particularly advantageous in drug discovery, which is a very long and expensive process. However, LLMs by themselves lack in-depth knowledge about specific domains and can generate factually incorrect information. Moreover, they are not able to perform more complex actions that imply the usage of external tools. Our work is focused on these two issues. Firstly, we show how the implementation of an advanced RAG system can help the LLM to generate more accurate answers to drug-discovery-related questions. The results show that the answers generated by the LLM with the RAG system surpass in quality the answers produced by the model without RAG. Secondly, we show how to create an automatic target dossier using LLMs and incorporating them with external tools that they can use to execute more intricate tasks to gather data such as accessing databases and executing code. The result is a production-ready target dossier containing the acquired information summarized into a PDF and a PowerPoint presentation.
AsthmaBot: Multi-modal, Multi-Lingual Retrieval Augmented Generation For Asthma Patient Support
Authors: Adil Bahaj, Mounir Ghogho
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Question Answering, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Asthma rates have risen globally, driven by environmental and lifestyle factors. Access to immediate medical care is limited, particularly in developing countries, necessitating automated support systems. Large Language Models like ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer) and Gemini have advanced natural language processing in general and question answering in particular, however, they are prone to producing factually incorrect responses (i.e. hallucinations). Retrieval-augmented generation systems, integrating curated documents, can improve large language models' performance and reduce the incidence of hallucination. We introduce AsthmaBot, a multi-lingual, multi-modal retrieval-augmented generation system for asthma support. Evaluation of an asthma-related frequently asked questions dataset shows AsthmaBot's efficacy. AsthmaBot has an added interactive and intuitive interface that integrates different data modalities (text, images, videos) to make it accessible to the larger public. AsthmaBot is available online via \url{asthmabot.datanets.org}.
Interactive Example-based Explanations to Improve Health Professionals' Onboarding with AI for Human-AI Collaborative Decision Making
Authors: Min Hun Lee, Renee Bao Xuan Ng, Silvana Xinyi Choo, Shamala Thilarajah
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

A growing research explores the usage of AI explanations on user's decision phases for human-AI collaborative decision-making. However, previous studies found the issues of overreliance on `wrong' AI outputs. In this paper, we propose interactive example-based explanations to improve health professionals' onboarding with AI for their better reliance on AI during AI-assisted decision-making. We implemented an AI-based decision support system that utilizes a neural network to assess the quality of post-stroke survivors' exercises and interactive example-based explanations that systematically surface the nearest neighborhoods of a test/task sample from the training set of the AI model to assist users' onboarding with the AI model. To investigate the effect of interactive example-based explanations, we conducted a study with domain experts, health professionals to evaluate their performance and reliance on AI. Our interactive example-based explanations during onboarding assisted health professionals in having a better reliance on AI and making a higher ratio of making `right' decisions and a lower ratio of `wrong' decisions than providing only feature-based explanations during the decision-support phase. Our study discusses new challenges of assisting user's onboarding with AI for human-AI collaborative decision-making.
Layer-wise Model Merging for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation in Segmentation Tasks
Authors: Roberto Alcover-Couso, Juan C. SanMiguel, Marcos Escudero-Viñolo, Jose M Martínez
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Panoptic Segmentation, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Merging parameters of multiple models has resurfaced as an effective strategy to enhance task performance and robustness, but prior work is limited by the high costs of ensemble creation and inference. In this paper, we leverage the abundance of freely accessible trained models to introduce a cost-free approach to model merging. It focuses on a layer-wise integration of merged models, aiming to maintain the distinctiveness of the task-specific final layers while unifying the initial layers, which are primarily associated with feature extraction. This approach ensures parameter consistency across all layers, essential for boosting performance. Moreover, it facilitates seamless integration of knowledge, enabling effective merging of models from different datasets and tasks. Specifically, we investigate its applicability in Unsupervised Domain Adaptation (UDA), an unexplored area for model merging, for Semantic and Panoptic Segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate substantial UDA improvements without additional costs for merging same-architecture models from distinct datasets ($\uparrow 2.6\%$ mIoU) and different-architecture models with a shared backbone ($\uparrow 6.8\%$ mIoU). Furthermore, merging Semantic and Panoptic Segmentation models increases mPQ by $\uparrow 7\%$. These findings are validated across a wide variety of UDA strategies, architectures, and datasets.
CLSP: High-Fidelity Contrastive Language-State Pre-training for Agent State Representation
Authors: Fuxian Huang, Qi Zhang, Shaopeng Zhai, Jie Wang, Tianyi Zhang, Haoran Zhang, Ming Zhou, Yu Liu, Yu Qiao
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence, multimodal learning has become an important research area. For intelligent agents, the state is a crucial modality to convey precise information alongside common modalities like images, videos, and language. This becomes especially clear with the broad adoption of reinforcement learning and multimodal large language models. Nevertheless, the representation of state modality still lags in development. To this end, we propose a High-Fidelity Contrastive Language-State Pre-training (CLSP) method, which can accurately encode state information into general representations for both reinforcement learning and multimodal large language models. Specifically, we first design a pre-training task based on the classification to train an encoder with coarse-grained information. Next, we construct data pairs of states and language descriptions, utilizing the pre-trained encoder to initialize the CLSP encoder. Then, we deploy contrastive learning to train the CLSP encoder to effectively represent precise state information. Additionally, we enhance the representation of numerical information using the Random Fourier Features (RFF) method for high-fidelity mapping. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior precision and generalization capabilities of our representation, achieving outstanding results in text-state retrieval, reinforcement learning navigation tasks, and multimodal large language model understanding.
Towards Universal Large-Scale Foundational Model for Natural Gas Demand Forecasting
Authors: Xinxing Zhou, Jiaqi Ye, Shubao Zhao, Ming Jin, Zhaoxiang Hou, Chengyi Yang, Zengxiang Li, Yanlong Wen, Xiaojie Yuan
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Demand Forecasting

In the context of global energy strategy, accurate natural gas demand forecasting is crucial for ensuring efficient resource allocation and operational planning. Traditional forecasting methods struggle to cope with the growing complexity and variability of gas consumption patterns across diverse industries and commercial sectors. To address these challenges, we propose the first foundation model specifically tailored for natural gas demand forecasting. Foundation models, known for their ability to generalize across tasks and datasets, offer a robust solution to the limitations of traditional methods, such as the need for separate models for different customer segments and their limited generalization capabilities. Our approach leverages contrastive learning to improve prediction accuracy in real-world scenarios, particularly by tackling issues such as noise in historical consumption data and the potential misclassification of similar data samples, which can lead to degradation in the quaility of the representation and thus the accuracy of downstream forecasting tasks. By integrating advanced noise filtering techniques within the contrastive learning framework, our model enhances the quality of learned representations, leading to more accurate predictions. Furthermore, the model undergoes industry-specific fine-tuning during pretraining, enabling it to better capture the unique characteristics of gas consumption across various sectors. We conducted extensive experiments using a large-scale dataset from ENN Group, which includes data from over 10,000 industrial, commercial, and welfare-related customers across multiple regions. Our model outperformed existing state-of-the-art methods, demonstrating a relative improvement in MSE by 3.68\% and in MASE by 6.15\% compared to the best available model.
Spatial-Temporal Mixture-of-Graph-Experts for Multi-Type Crime Prediction
Authors: Ziyang Wu, Fan Liu, Jindong Han, Yuxuan Liang, Hao liu
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Crime Prediction

As various types of crime continue to threaten public safety and economic development, predicting the occurrence of multiple types of crimes becomes increasingly vital for effective prevention measures. Although extensive efforts have been made, most of them overlook the heterogeneity of different crime categories and fail to address the issue of imbalanced spatial distribution. In this work, we propose a Spatial-Temporal Mixture-of-Graph-Experts (ST-MoGE) framework for collective multiple-type crime prediction. To enhance the model's ability to identify diverse spatial-temporal dependencies and mitigate potential conflicts caused by spatial-temporal heterogeneity of different crime categories, we introduce an attentive-gated Mixture-of-Graph-Experts (MGEs) module to capture the distinctive and shared crime patterns of each crime category. Then, we propose Cross-Expert Contrastive Learning(CECL) to update the MGEs and force each expert to focus on specific pattern modeling, thereby reducing blending and redundancy. Furthermore, to address the issue of imbalanced spatial distribution, we propose a Hierarchical Adaptive Loss Re-weighting (HALR) approach to eliminate biases and insufficient learning of data-scarce regions. To evaluate the effectiveness of our methods, we conduct comprehensive experiments on two real-world crime datasets and compare our results with twelve advanced baselines. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our methods.
IRSC: A Zero-shot Evaluation Benchmark for Information Retrieval through Semantic Comprehension in Retrieval-Augmented Generation Scenarios
Authors: Hai Lin, Shaoxiong Zhan, Junyou Su, Haitao Zheng, Hui Wang
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

In Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) tasks using Large Language Models (LLMs), the quality of retrieved information is critical to the final output. This paper introduces the IRSC benchmark for evaluating the performance of embedding models in multilingual RAG tasks. The benchmark encompasses five retrieval tasks: query retrieval, title retrieval, part-of-paragraph retrieval, keyword retrieval, and summary retrieval. Our research addresses the current lack of comprehensive testing and effective comparison methods for embedding models in RAG scenarios. We introduced new metrics: the Similarity of Semantic Comprehension Index (SSCI) and the Retrieval Capability Contest Index (RCCI), and evaluated models such as Snowflake-Arctic, BGE, GTE, and M3E. Our contributions include: 1) the IRSC benchmark, 2) the SSCI and RCCI metrics, and 3) insights into the cross-lingual limitations of embedding models. The IRSC benchmark aims to enhance the understanding and development of accurate retrieval systems in RAG tasks. All code and datasets are available at: https://github.com/Jasaxion/IRSC_Benchmark
TFG: Unified Training-Free Guidance for Diffusion Models
Authors: Haotian Ye, Haowei Lin, Jiaqi Han, Minkai Xu, Sheng Liu, Yitao Liang, Jianzhu Ma, James Zou, Stefano Ermon
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00

Given an unconditional diffusion model and a predictor for a target property of interest (e.g., a classifier), the goal of training-free guidance is to generate samples with desirable target properties without additional training. Existing methods, though effective in various individual applications, often lack theoretical grounding and rigorous testing on extensive benchmarks. As a result, they could even fail on simple tasks, and applying them to a new problem becomes unavoidably difficult. This paper introduces a novel algorithmic framework encompassing existing methods as special cases, unifying the study of training-free guidance into the analysis of an algorithm-agnostic design space. Via theoretical and empirical investigation, we propose an efficient and effective hyper-parameter searching strategy that can be readily applied to any downstream task. We systematically benchmark across 7 diffusion models on 16 tasks with 40 targets, and improve performance by 8.5% on average. Our framework and benchmark offer a solid foundation for conditional generation in a training-free manner.
Stage-Wise Reward Shaping for Acrobatic Robots: A Constrained Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning Approach
Authors: Dohyeong Kim, Hyeokjin Kwon, Junseok Kim, Gunmin Lee, Songhwai Oh
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-Objective Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

As the complexity of tasks addressed through reinforcement learning (RL) increases, the definition of reward functions also has become highly complicated. We introduce an RL method aimed at simplifying the reward-shaping process through intuitive strategies. Initially, instead of a single reward function composed of various terms, we define multiple reward and cost functions within a constrained multi-objective RL (CMORL) framework. For tasks involving sequential complex movements, we segment the task into distinct stages and define multiple rewards and costs for each stage. Finally, we introduce a practical CMORL algorithm that maximizes objectives based on these rewards while satisfying constraints defined by the costs. The proposed method has been successfully demonstrated across a variety of acrobatic tasks in both simulation and real-world environments. Additionally, it has been shown to successfully perform tasks compared to existing RL and constrained RL algorithms. Our code is available at https://github.com/rllab-snu/Stage-Wise-CMORL.
Development and Validation of Heparin Dosing Policies Using an Offline Reinforcement Learning Algorithm
Authors: Yooseok Lim, Inbeom Park, Sujee Lee
Date: 2024-09-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, Off-policy evaluation, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Appropriate medication dosages in the intensive care unit (ICU) are critical for patient survival. Heparin, used to treat thrombosis and inhibit blood clotting in the ICU, requires careful administration due to its complexity and sensitivity to various factors, including patient clinical characteristics, underlying medical conditions, and potential drug interactions. Incorrect dosing can lead to severe complications such as strokes or excessive bleeding. To address these challenges, this study proposes a reinforcement learning (RL)-based personalized optimal heparin dosing policy that guides dosing decisions reliably within the therapeutic range based on individual patient conditions. A batch-constrained policy was implemented to minimize out-of-distribution errors in an offline RL environment and effectively integrate RL with existing clinician policies. The policy's effectiveness was evaluated using weighted importance sampling, an off-policy evaluation method, and the relationship between state representations and Q-values was explored using t-SNE. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted using the Medical Information Mart for Intensive Care III (MIMIC-III) database, demonstrating the efficacy of the proposed RL-based medication policy. Leveraging advanced machine learning techniques and extensive clinical data, this research enhances heparin administration practices and establishes a precedent for the development of sophisticated decision-support tools in medicine.