pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ToolNet: Connecting Large Language Models with Massive Tools via Tool Graph
Authors: Xukun Liu, Zhiyuan Peng, Xiaoyuan Yi, Xing Xie, Lirong Xiang, Yuchen Liu, Dongkuan Xu
Date: 2024-02-29 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

While achieving remarkable progress in a broad range of tasks, large language models (LLMs) remain significantly limited in properly using massive external tools. Existing in-context learning approaches simply format tools into a list of plain text descriptions and input them to LLMs, from which, LLMs generate a sequence of tool calls to solve problems step by step. Such a paradigm ignores the intrinsic dependency between tools and offloads all reasoning loads to LLMs, making them restricted to a limited number of specifically designed tools. It thus remains challenging for LLMs to operate on a library of massive tools, casting a great limitation when confronted with real-world scenarios. This paper proposes ToolNet, a plug-and-play framework that scales up the number of tools to thousands with a moderate increase in token consumption. ToolNet organizes tools into a directed graph. Each node represents a tool, and weighted edges denote tool transition. Starting from an initial tool node, an LLM navigates in the graph by iteratively choosing the next one from its successors until the task is resolved. Extensive experiments show that ToolNet can achieve impressive results in challenging multi-hop tool learning datasets and is resilient to tool failures.
Time to Cite: Modeling Citation Networks using the Dynamic Impact Single-Event Embedding Model
Authors: Nikolaos Nakis, Abdulkadir Celikkanat, Louis Boucherie, Sune Lehmann, Morten Mørup
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Embedding

Understanding the structure and dynamics of scientific research, i.e., the science of science (SciSci), has become an important area of research in order to address imminent questions including how scholars interact to advance science, how disciplines are related and evolve, and how research impact can be quantified and predicted. Central to the study of SciSci has been the analysis of citation networks. Here, two prominent modeling methodologies have been employed: one is to assess the citation impact dynamics of papers using parametric distributions, and the other is to embed the citation networks in a latent space optimal for characterizing the static relations between papers in terms of their citations. Interestingly, citation networks are a prominent example of single-event dynamic networks, i.e., networks for which each dyad only has a single event (i.e., the point in time of citation). We presently propose a novel likelihood function for the characterization of such single-event networks. Using this likelihood, we propose the Dynamic Impact Single-Event Embedding model (DISEE). The \textsc{\modelabbrev} model characterizes the scientific interactions in terms of a latent distance model in which random effects account for citation heterogeneity while the time-varying impact is characterized using existing parametric representations for assessment of dynamic impact. We highlight the proposed approach on several real citation networks finding that the DISEE well reconciles static latent distance network embedding approaches with classical dynamic impact assessments.
CLLMs: Consistency Large Language Models
Authors: Siqi Kou, Lanxiang Hu, Zhezhi He, Zhijie Deng, Hao Zhang
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00

Parallel decoding methods such as Jacobi decoding show promise for more efficient LLM inference as it breaks the sequential nature of the LLM decoding process and transforms it into parallelizable computation. However, in practice, it achieves little speedup compared to traditional autoregressive (AR) decoding, primarily because Jacobi decoding seldom accurately predicts more than one token in a single fixed-point iteration step. To address this, we develop a new approach aimed at realizing fast convergence from any state to the fixed point on a Jacobi trajectory. This is accomplished by refining the target LLM to consistently predict the fixed point given any state as input. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method, showing 2.4$\times$ to 3.4$\times$ improvements in generation speed while preserving generation quality across both domain-specific and open-domain benchmarks.
GraphPub: Generation of Differential Privacy Graph with High Availability
Authors: Wanghan Xu, Bin Shi, Ao Liu, Jiqiang Zhang, Bo Dong
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

In recent years, with the rapid development of graph neural networks (GNN), more and more graph datasets have been published for GNN tasks. However, when an upstream data owner publishes graph data, there are often many privacy concerns, because many real-world graph data contain sensitive information like person's friend list. Differential privacy (DP) is a common method to protect privacy, but due to the complex topological structure of graph data, applying DP on graphs often affects the message passing and aggregation of GNN models, leading to a decrease in model accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel graph edge protection framework, graph publisher (GraphPub), which can protect graph topology while ensuring that the availability of data is basically unchanged. Through reverse learning and the encoder-decoder mechanism, we search for some false edges that do not have a large negative impact on the aggregation of node features, and use them to replace some real edges. The modified graph will be published, which is difficult to distinguish between real and false data. Sufficient experiments prove that our framework achieves model accuracy close to the original graph with an extremely low privacy budget.
Position Paper: Agent AI Towards a Holistic Intelligence
Authors: Qiuyuan Huang, Naoki Wake, Bidipta Sarkar, Zane Durante, Ran Gong, Rohan Taori, Yusuke Noda, Demetri Terzopoulos, Noboru Kuno, Ade Famoti, Ashley Llorens, John Langford, Hoi Vo, Li Fei-Fei, Katsu Ikeuchi, Jianfeng Gao
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Position

Recent advancements in large foundation models have remarkably enhanced our understanding of sensory information in open-world environments. In leveraging the power of foundation models, it is crucial for AI research to pivot away from excessive reductionism and toward an emphasis on systems that function as cohesive wholes. Specifically, we emphasize developing Agent AI -- an embodied system that integrates large foundation models into agent actions. The emerging field of Agent AI spans a wide range of existing embodied and agent-based multimodal interactions, including robotics, gaming, and healthcare systems, etc. In this paper, we propose a novel large action model to achieve embodied intelligent behavior, the Agent Foundation Model. On top of this idea, we discuss how agent AI exhibits remarkable capabilities across a variety of domains and tasks, challenging our understanding of learning and cognition. Furthermore, we discuss the potential of Agent AI from an interdisciplinary perspective, underscoring AI cognition and consciousness within scientific discourse. We believe that those discussions serve as a basis for future research directions and encourage broader societal engagement.
Learning to Deliver: a Foundation Model for the Montreal Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem
Authors: Samuel J. K. Chin, Matthias Winkenbach, Akash Srivastava
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model

In this paper, we present the Foundation Model for the Montreal Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (FM-MCVRP), a novel Deep Learning (DL) model that approximates high-quality solutions to a variant of the Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (CVRP) that characterizes many real-world applications. The so-called Montreal Capacitated Vehicle Routing Problem (MCVRP), first formally described by Bengio et al. (2021), is defined on a fixed and finite graph, which is analogous to a city. Each MCVRP instance is essentially the sub-graph connecting a randomly sampled subset of the nodes in the fixed graph, which represent a set of potential addresses in a real-world delivery problem on a given day. Our work exploits this problem structure to frame the MCVRP as an analogous Natural Language Processing (NLP) task. Specifically, we leverage a Transformer architecture embedded in a Large Language Model (LLM) framework to train our model in a supervised manner on computationally inexpensive, sub-optimal MCVRP solutions obtained algorithmically. Through comprehensive computational experiments, we show that FM-MCVRP produces better MCVRP solutions than the training data and generalizes to larger sized problem instances not seen during training. Even when compared to near-optimal solutions from state-of-the-art heuristics, FM-MCVRP yields competitive results despite being trained on inferior data. For instance, for 400-customer problems, FM-MCVRP solutions on average fall within 2% of the benchmark. Our results further demonstrate that unlike prior works in the literature, FM-MCVRP is a unified model, which performs consistently and reliably on a range of problem instance sizes and parameter values such as the vehicle capacity.
On the Challenges and Opportunities in Generative AI
Authors: Laura Manduchi, Kushagra Pandey, Robert Bamler, Ryan Cotterell, Sina Däubener, Sophie Fellenz, Asja Fischer, Thomas Gärtner, Matthias Kirchler, Marius Kloft, Yingzhen Li, Christoph Lippert, Gerard de Melo, Eric Nalisnick, Björn Ommer, Rajesh Ranganath, Maja Rudolph, Karen Ullrich, Guy Van Den Broeck, Julia E Vogt, Yixin Wang, Florian Wenzel, Frank Wood, Stephan Mandt, Vincent Fortuin
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00

The field of deep generative modeling has grown rapidly and consistently over the years. With the availability of massive amounts of training data coupled with advances in scalable unsupervised learning paradigms, recent large-scale generative models show tremendous promise in synthesizing high-resolution images and text, as well as structured data such as videos and molecules. However, we argue that current large-scale generative AI models do not sufficiently address several fundamental issues that hinder their widespread adoption across domains. In this work, we aim to identify key unresolved challenges in modern generative AI paradigms that should be tackled to further enhance their capabilities, versatility, and reliability. By identifying these challenges, we aim to provide researchers with valuable insights for exploring fruitful research directions, thereby fostering the development of more robust and accessible generative AI solutions.
Auditable Homomorphic-based Decentralized Collaborative AI with Attribute-based Differential Privacy
Authors: Lo-Yao Yeh, Sheng-Po Tseng, Chia-Hsun Lu, Chih-Ya Shen
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Federated Learning

In recent years, the notion of federated learning (FL) has led to the new paradigm of distributed artificial intelligence (AI) with privacy preservation. However, most current FL systems suffer from data privacy issues due to the requirement of a trusted third party. Although some previous works introduce differential privacy to protect the data, however, it may also significantly deteriorate the model performance. To address these issues, we propose a novel decentralized collaborative AI framework, named Auditable Homomorphic-based Decentralised Collaborative AI (AerisAI), to improve security with homomorphic encryption and fine-grained differential privacy. Our proposed AerisAI directly aggregates the encrypted parameters with a blockchain-based smart contract to get rid of the need of a trusted third party. We also propose a brand-new concept for eliminating the negative impacts of differential privacy for model performance. Moreover, the proposed AerisAI also provides the broadcast-aware group key management based on ciphertext-policy attribute-based encryption (CPABE) to achieve fine-grained access control based on different service-level agreements. We provide a formal theoretical analysis of the proposed AerisAI as well as the functionality comparison with the other baselines. We also conduct extensive experiments on real datasets to evaluate the proposed approach. The experimental results indicate that our proposed AerisAI significantly outperforms the other state-of-the-art baselines.
Explainable Session-based Recommendation via Path Reasoning
Authors: Yang Cao, Shuo Shang, Jun Wang, Wei zhang
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning, Knowledge Graphs, Session-Based Recommendations

This paper explores providing explainability for session-based recommendation (SR) by path reasoning. Current SR models emphasize accuracy but lack explainability, while traditional path reasoning prioritizes knowledge graph exploration, ignoring sequential patterns present in the session history. Therefore, we propose a generalized hierarchical reinforcement learning framework for SR, which improves the explainability of existing SR models via Path Reasoning, namely PR4SR. Considering the different importance of items to the session, we design the session-level agent to select the items in the session as the starting point for path reasoning and the path-level agent to perform path reasoning. In particular, we design a multi-target reward mechanism to adapt to the skip behaviors of sequential patterns in SR, and introduce path midpoint reward to enhance the exploration efficiency in knowledge graphs. To improve the completeness of the knowledge graph and to diversify the paths of explanation, we incorporate extracted feature information from images into the knowledge graph. We instantiate PR4SR in five state-of-the-art SR models (i.e., GRU4REC, NARM, GCSAN, SR-GNN, SASRec) and compare it with other explainable SR frameworks, to demonstrate the effectiveness of PR4SR for recommendation and explanation tasks through extensive experiments with these approaches on four datasets.
MedAide: Leveraging Large Language Models for On-Premise Medical Assistance on Edge Devices
Authors: Abdul Basit, Khizar Hussain, Muhammad Abdullah Hanif, Muhammad Shafique
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Edge-computing

Large language models (LLMs) are revolutionizing various domains with their remarkable natural language processing (NLP) abilities. However, deploying LLMs in resource-constrained edge computing and embedded systems presents significant challenges. Another challenge lies in delivering medical assistance in remote areas with limited healthcare facilities and infrastructure. To address this, we introduce MedAide, an on-premise healthcare chatbot. It leverages tiny-LLMs integrated with LangChain, providing efficient edge-based preliminary medical diagnostics and support. MedAide employs model optimizations for minimal memory footprint and latency on embedded edge devices without server infrastructure. The training process is optimized using low-rank adaptation (LoRA). Additionally, the model is trained on diverse medical datasets, employing reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) to enhance its domain-specific capabilities. The system is implemented on various consumer GPUs and Nvidia Jetson development board. MedAide achieves 77\% accuracy in medical consultations and scores 56 in USMLE benchmark, enabling an energy-efficient healthcare assistance platform that alleviates privacy concerns due to edge-based deployment, thereby empowering the community.
TroubleLLM: Align to Red Team Expert
Authors: Zhuoer Xu, Jianping Zhang, Shiwen Cui, Changhua Meng, Weiqiang Wang
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Large Language Models (LLMs) become the start-of-the-art solutions for a variety of natural language tasks and are integrated into real-world applications. However, LLMs can be potentially harmful in manifesting undesirable safety issues like social biases and toxic content. It is imperative to assess its safety issues before deployment. However, the quality and diversity of test prompts generated by existing methods are still far from satisfactory. Not only are these methods labor-intensive and require large budget costs, but the controllability of test prompt generation is lacking for the specific testing domain of LLM applications. With the idea of LLM for LLM testing, we propose the first LLM, called TroubleLLM, to generate controllable test prompts on LLM safety issues. Extensive experiments and human evaluation illustrate the superiority of TroubleLLM on generation quality and generation controllability.
Enhancing Retinal Vascular Structure Segmentation in Images With a Novel Design Two-Path Interactive Fusion Module Model
Authors: Rui Yang, Shunpu Zhang
Date: 2024-03-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Retinal Vessel Segmentation, Segmentation

Precision in identifying and differentiating micro and macro blood vessels in the retina is crucial for the diagnosis of retinal diseases, although it poses a significant challenge. Current autoencoding-based segmentation approaches encounter limitations as they are constrained by the encoder and undergo a reduction in resolution during the encoding stage. The inability to recover lost information in the decoding phase further impedes these approaches. Consequently, their capacity to extract the retinal microvascular structure is restricted. To address this issue, we introduce Swin-Res-Net, a specialized module designed to enhance the precision of retinal vessel segmentation. Swin-Res-Net utilizes the Swin transformer which uses shifted windows with displacement for partitioning, to reduce network complexity and accelerate model convergence. Additionally, the model incorporates interactive fusion with a functional module in the Res2Net architecture. The Res2Net leverages multi-scale techniques to enlarge the receptive field of the convolutional kernel, enabling the extraction of additional semantic information from the image. This combination creates a new module that enhances the localization and separation of micro vessels in the retina. To improve the efficiency of processing vascular information, we've added a module to eliminate redundant information between the encoding and decoding steps. Our proposed architecture produces outstanding results, either meeting or surpassing those of other published models. The AUC reflects significant enhancements, achieving values of 0.9956, 0.9931, and 0.9946 in pixel-wise segmentation of retinal vessels across three widely utilized datasets: CHASE-DB1, DRIVE, and STARE, respectively. Moreover, Swin-Res-Net outperforms alternative architectures, demonstrating superior performance in both IOU and F1 measure metrics.
ShapeBoost: Boosting Human Shape Estimation with Part-Based Parameterization and Clothing-Preserving Augmentation
Authors: Siyuan Bian, Jiefeng Li, Jiasheng Tang, Cewu Lu
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

Accurate human shape recovery from a monocular RGB image is a challenging task because humans come in different shapes and sizes and wear different clothes. In this paper, we propose ShapeBoost, a new human shape recovery framework that achieves pixel-level alignment even for rare body shapes and high accuracy for people wearing different types of clothes. Unlike previous approaches that rely on the use of PCA-based shape coefficients, we adopt a new human shape parameterization that decomposes the human shape into bone lengths and the mean width of each part slice. This part-based parameterization technique achieves a balance between flexibility and validity using a semi-analytical shape reconstruction algorithm. Based on this new parameterization, a clothing-preserving data augmentation module is proposed to generate realistic images with diverse body shapes and accurate annotations. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in diverse body shape situations as well as in varied clothing situations.
Mitigating the Bias in the Model for Continual Test-Time Adaptation
Authors: Inseop Chung, Kyomin Hwang, Jayeon Yoo, Nojun Kwak
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Test-time Adaptation

Continual Test-Time Adaptation (CTA) is a challenging task that aims to adapt a source pre-trained model to continually changing target domains. In the CTA setting, a model does not know when the target domain changes, thus facing a drastic change in the distribution of streaming inputs during the test-time. The key challenge is to keep adapting the model to the continually changing target domains in an online manner. We find that a model shows highly biased predictions as it constantly adapts to the chaining distribution of the target data. It predicts certain classes more often than other classes, making inaccurate over-confident predictions. This paper mitigates this issue to improve performance in the CTA scenario. To alleviate the bias issue, we make class-wise exponential moving average target prototypes with reliable target samples and exploit them to cluster the target features class-wisely. Moreover, we aim to align the target distributions to the source distribution by anchoring the target feature to its corresponding source prototype. With extensive experiments, our proposed method achieves noteworthy performance gain when applied on top of existing CTA methods without substantial adaptation time overhead.
DNA Family: Boosting Weight-Sharing NAS with Block-Wise Supervisions
Authors: Guangrun Wang, Changlin Li, Liuchun Yuan, Jiefeng Peng, Xiaoyu Xian, Xiaodan Liang, Xiaojun Chang, Liang Lin
Date: 2024-03-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Neural Architecture Search

Neural Architecture Search (NAS), aiming at automatically designing neural architectures by machines, has been considered a key step toward automatic machine learning. One notable NAS branch is the weight-sharing NAS, which significantly improves search efficiency and allows NAS algorithms to run on ordinary computers. Despite receiving high expectations, this category of methods suffers from low search effectiveness. By employing a generalization boundedness tool, we demonstrate that the devil behind this drawback is the untrustworthy architecture rating with the oversized search space of the possible architectures. Addressing this problem, we modularize a large search space into blocks with small search spaces and develop a family of models with the distilling neural architecture (DNA) techniques. These proposed models, namely a DNA family, are capable of resolving multiple dilemmas of the weight-sharing NAS, such as scalability, efficiency, and multi-modal compatibility. Our proposed DNA models can rate all architecture candidates, as opposed to previous works that can only access a sub- search space using heuristic algorithms. Moreover, under a certain computational complexity constraint, our method can seek architectures with different depths and widths. Extensive experimental evaluations show that our models achieve state-of-the-art top-1 accuracy of 78.9% and 83.6% on ImageNet for a mobile convolutional network and a small vision transformer, respectively. Additionally, we provide in-depth empirical analysis and insights into neural architecture ratings. Codes available: \url{https://github.com/changlin31/DNA}.