pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ENOT: Expectile Regularization for Fast and Accurate Training of Neural Optimal Transport
Authors: Nazar Buzun, Maksim Bobrin, Dmitry V. Dylov
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

We present a new approach for Neural Optimal Transport (NOT) training procedure, capable of accurately and efficiently estimating optimal transportation plan via specific regularization on dual Kantorovich potentials. The main bottleneck of existing NOT solvers is associated with the procedure of finding a near-exact approximation of the conjugate operator (i.e., the c-transform), which is done either by optimizing over non-convex max-min objectives or by the computationally intensive fine-tuning of the initial approximated prediction. We resolve both issues by proposing a new, theoretically justified loss in the form of expectile regularisation which enforces binding conditions on the learning process of dual potentials. Such a regularization provides the upper bound estimation over the distribution of possible conjugate potentials and makes the learning stable, completely eliminating the need for additional extensive fine-tuning. Proposed method, called Expectile-Regularised Neural Optimal Transport (ENOT), outperforms previous state-of-the-art approaches on the established Wasserstein-2 benchmark tasks by a large margin (up to a 3-fold improvement in quality and up to a 10-fold improvement in runtime). Moreover, we showcase performance of ENOT for varying cost functions on different tasks such as image generation, showing robustness of proposed algorithm. OTT-JAX library includes our implementation of ENOT algorithm https://ott-jax.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials/ENOT.html
DeepCRE: Transforming Drug R&D via AI-Driven Cross-drug Response Evaluation
Authors: Ting Zhang, Hao Zhou, Hainan Wu, Hanwen Sunchu, Lei Hu, Xiaofang Chen, Suyuan Zhao, Gaochao liu, Chao Sun, Jiahuan Zhang, Yizhen Luo, Peng Liu, Zaiqing Nie, Yushuai Wu
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00

The fields of therapeutic application and drug research and development (R&D) both face substantial challenges, i.e., the therapeutic domain calls for more treatment alternatives, while numerous promising pre-clinical drugs have failed in clinical trials. One of the reasons is the inadequacy of Cross-drug Response Evaluation (CRE) during the late stages of drug R&D. Although in-silico CRE models bring a promising solution, existing methodologies are restricted to early stages of drug R&D, such as target and cell-line levels, offering limited improvement to clinical success rates. Herein, we introduce DeepCRE, a pioneering AI model designed to predict CRE effectively in the late stages of drug R&D. DeepCRE outperforms the existing best models by achieving an average performance improvement of 17.7% in patient-level CRE, and a 5-fold increase in indication-level CRE, facilitating more accurate personalized treatment predictions and better pharmaceutical value assessment for indications, respectively. Furthermore, DeepCRE has identified a set of six drug candidates that show significantly greater effectiveness than a comparator set of two approved drugs in 5/8 colorectal cancer organoids. This demonstrates the capability of DeepCRE to systematically uncover a spectrum of drug candidates with enhanced therapeutic effects, highlighting its potential to transform drug R&D.
German also Hallucinates! Inconsistency Detection in News Summaries with the Absinth Dataset
Authors: Laura Mascarell, Ribin Chalumattu, Annette Rios
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, In-Context Learning, News Summarization, Text Summarization

The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to remarkable progress on a wide range of natural language processing tasks. Despite the advances, these large-sized models still suffer from hallucinating information in their output, which poses a major issue in automatic text summarization, as we must guarantee that the generated summary is consistent with the content of the source document. Previous research addresses the challenging task of detecting hallucinations in the output (i.e. inconsistency detection) in order to evaluate the faithfulness of the generated summaries. However, these works primarily focus on English and recent multilingual approaches lack German data. This work presents absinth, a manually annotated dataset for hallucination detection in German news summarization and explores the capabilities of novel open-source LLMs on this task in both fine-tuning and in-context learning settings. We open-source and release the absinth dataset to foster further research on hallucination detection in German.
MedSafetyBench: Evaluating and Improving the Medical Safety of Large Language Models
Authors: Tessa Han, Aounon Kumar, Chirag Agarwal, Himabindu Lakkaraju
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics, General Knowledge

As large language models (LLMs) develop increasingly sophisticated capabilities and find applications in medical settings, it becomes important to assess their medical safety due to their far-reaching implications for personal and public health, patient safety, and human rights. However, there is little to no understanding of the notion of medical safety in the context of LLMs, let alone how to evaluate and improve it. To address this gap, we first define the notion of medical safety in LLMs based on the Principles of Medical Ethics set forth by the American Medical Association. We then leverage this understanding to introduce MedSafetyBench, the first benchmark dataset designed to measure the medical safety of LLMs. We demonstrate the utility of MedSafetyBench by using it to evaluate and improve the medical safety of LLMs. Our results show that publicly-available medical LLMs do not meet standards of medical safety and that fine-tuning them using MedSafetyBench improves their medical safety while preserving their medical performance. By introducing this new benchmark dataset, our work enables a systematic study of the state of medical safety in LLMs and motivates future work in this area, paving the way to mitigate the safety risks of LLMs in medicine. The benchmark dataset and code are available at https://github.com/AI4LIFE-GROUP/med-safety-bench.
SUPClust: Active Learning at the Boundaries
Authors: Yuta Ono, Till Aczel, Benjamin Estermann, Roger Wattenhofer
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning

Active learning is a machine learning paradigm designed to optimize model performance in a setting where labeled data is expensive to acquire. In this work, we propose a novel active learning method called SUPClust that seeks to identify points at the decision boundary between classes. By targeting these points, SUPClust aims to gather information that is most informative for refining the model's prediction of complex decision regions. We demonstrate experimentally that labeling these points leads to strong model performance. This improvement is observed even in scenarios characterized by strong class imbalance.
A&B BNN: Add&Bit-Operation-Only Hardware-Friendly Binary Neural Network
Authors: Ruichen Ma, Guanchao Qiao, Yian Liu, Liwei Meng, Ning Ning, Yang Liu, Shaogang Hu
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Image Classification

Binary neural networks utilize 1-bit quantized weights and activations to reduce both the model's storage demands and computational burden. However, advanced binary architectures still incorporate millions of inefficient and nonhardware-friendly full-precision multiplication operations. A&B BNN is proposed to directly remove part of the multiplication operations in a traditional BNN and replace the rest with an equal number of bit operations, introducing the mask layer and the quantized RPReLU structure based on the normalizer-free network architecture. The mask layer can be removed during inference by leveraging the intrinsic characteristics of BNN with straightforward mathematical transformations to avoid the associated multiplication operations. The quantized RPReLU structure enables more efficient bit operations by constraining its slope to be integer powers of 2. Experimental results achieved 92.30%, 69.35%, and 66.89% on the CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and ImageNet datasets, respectively, which are competitive with the state-of-the-art. Ablation studies have verified the efficacy of the quantized RPReLU structure, leading to a 1.14% enhancement on the ImageNet compared to using a fixed slope RLeakyReLU. The proposed add&bit-operation-only BNN offers an innovative approach for hardware-friendly network architecture.
Learning 3D object-centric representation through prediction
Authors: John Day, Tushar Arora, Jirui Liu, Li Erran Li, Ming Bo Cai
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, Prediction

As part of human core knowledge, the representation of objects is the building block of mental representation that supports high-level concepts and symbolic reasoning. While humans develop the ability of perceiving objects situated in 3D environments without supervision, models that learn the same set of abilities with similar constraints faced by human infants are lacking. Towards this end, we developed a novel network architecture that simultaneously learns to 1) segment objects from discrete images, 2) infer their 3D locations, and 3) perceive depth, all while using only information directly available to the brain as training data, namely: sequences of images and self-motion. The core idea is treating objects as latent causes of visual input which the brain uses to make efficient predictions of future scenes. This results in object representations being learned as an essential byproduct of learning to predict.
Bridging Diversity and Uncertainty in Active learning with Self-Supervised Pre-Training
Authors: Paul Doucet, Benjamin Estermann, Till Aczel, Roger Wattenhofer
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Diversity

This study addresses the integration of diversity-based and uncertainty-based sampling strategies in active learning, particularly within the context of self-supervised pre-trained models. We introduce a straightforward heuristic called TCM that mitigates the cold start problem while maintaining strong performance across various data levels. By initially applying TypiClust for diversity sampling and subsequently transitioning to uncertainty sampling with Margin, our approach effectively combines the strengths of both strategies. Our experiments demonstrate that TCM consistently outperforms existing methods across various datasets in both low and high data regimes.
Diffusion on language model encodings for protein sequence generation
Authors: Viacheslav Meshchaninov, Pavel Strashnov, Andrey Shevtsov, Fedor Nikolaev, Nikita Ivanisenko, Olga Kardymon, Dmitry Vetrov
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Protein Design, Protein Language Model

Protein sequence design has seen significant advances through discrete diffusion and autoregressive approaches, yet the potential of continuous diffusion remains underexplored. Here, we present DiMA, a latent diffusion framework that operates on protein language model representations. Through systematic exploration of architectural choices and diffusion components, we develop a robust methodology that generalizes across multiple protein encoders ranging from 8M to 3B parameters. We demonstrate that our framework achieves consistently high performance across sequence-only (ESM-2, ESMc), dual-decodable (CHEAP), and multimodal (SaProt) representations using the same architecture and training approach. We extensively evaluate existing methods alongside DiMA using multiple metrics across two protein modalities, covering quality, diversity, novelty, and distribution matching of generated proteins. DiMA consistently produces novel, high-quality and diverse protein sequences and achieves strong results compared to baselines such as autoregressive, discrete diffusion and flow matching language models. The model demonstrates versatile functionality, supporting conditional generation tasks including protein family-generation, motif scaffolding and infilling, and fold-specific sequence design. This work provides a universal continuous diffusion framework for protein sequence generation, offering both architectural insights and practical applicability across various protein design scenarios.
Towards Controllable Time Series Generation
Authors: Yifan Bao, Yihao Ang, Qiang Huang, Anthony K. H. Tung, Zhiyong Huang
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Generation

Time Series Generation (TSG) has emerged as a pivotal technique in synthesizing data that accurately mirrors real-world time series, becoming indispensable in numerous applications. Despite significant advancements in TSG, its efficacy frequently hinges on having large training datasets. This dependency presents a substantial challenge in data-scarce scenarios, especially when dealing with rare or unique conditions. To confront these challenges, we explore a new problem of Controllable Time Series Generation (CTSG), aiming to produce synthetic time series that can adapt to various external conditions, thereby tackling the data scarcity issue. In this paper, we propose \textbf{C}ontrollable \textbf{T}ime \textbf{S}eries (\textsf{CTS}), an innovative VAE-agnostic framework tailored for CTSG. A key feature of \textsf{CTS} is that it decouples the mapping process from standard VAE training, enabling precise learning of a complex interplay between latent features and external conditions. Moreover, we develop a comprehensive evaluation scheme for CTSG. Extensive experiments across three real-world time series datasets showcase \textsf{CTS}'s exceptional capabilities in generating high-quality, controllable outputs. This underscores its adeptness in seamlessly integrating latent features with external conditions. Extending \textsf{CTS} to the image domain highlights its remarkable potential for explainability and further reinforces its versatility across different modalities.
MolNexTR: A Generalized Deep Learning Model for Molecular Image Recognition
Authors: Yufan Chen, Ching Ting Leung, Yong Huang, Jianwei Sun, Hao Chen, Hanyu Gao
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Deep Learning

In the field of chemical structure recognition, the task of converting molecular images into machine-readable data formats such as SMILES string stands as a significant challenge, primarily due to the varied drawing styles and conventions prevalent in chemical literature. To bridge this gap, we proposed MolNexTR, a novel image-to-graph deep learning model that collaborates to fuse the strengths of ConvNext, a powerful Convolutional Neural Network variant, and Vision-TRansformer. This integration facilitates a more detailed extraction of both local and global features from molecular images. MolNexTR can predict atoms and bonds simultaneously and understand their layout rules. It also excels at flexibly integrating symbolic chemistry principles to discern chirality and decipher abbreviated structures. We further incorporate a series of advanced algorithms, including an improved data augmentation module, an image contamination module, and a post-processing module for getting the final SMILES output. These modules cooperate to enhance the model's robustness to diverse styles of molecular images found in real literature. In our test sets, MolNexTR has demonstrated superior performance, achieving an accuracy rate of 81-97%, marking a significant advancement in the domain of molecular structure recognition.
General2Specialized LLMs Translation for E-commerce
Authors: Kaidi Chen, Ben Chen, Dehong Gao, Huangyu Dai, Wen Jiang, Wei Ning, Shanqing Yu, Libin Yang, Xiaoyan Cai
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

Existing Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models mainly handle translation in the general domain, while overlooking domains with special writing formulas, such as e-commerce and legal documents. Taking e-commerce as an example, the texts usually include amounts of domain-related words and have more grammar problems, which leads to inferior performances of current NMT methods. To address these problems, we collect two domain-related resources, including a set of term pairs (aligned Chinese-English bilingual terms) and a parallel corpus annotated for the e-commerce domain. Furthermore, we propose a two-step fine-tuning paradigm (named G2ST) with self-contrastive semantic enhancement to transfer one general NMT model to the specialized NMT model for e-commerce. The paradigm can be used for the NMT models based on Large language models (LLMs). Extensive evaluations on real e-commerce titles demonstrate the superior translation quality and robustness of our G2ST approach, as compared with state-of-the-art NMT models such as LLaMA, Qwen, GPT-3.5, and even GPT-4.
K-Link: Knowledge-Link Graph from LLMs for Enhanced Representation Learning in Multivariate Time-Series Data
Authors: Yucheng Wang, Ruibing Jin, Min Wu, XiaoLi Li, Lihua Xie, Zhenghua Chen
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: General Knowledge, graph construction, Representation Learning, Time Series

Sourced from various sensors and organized chronologically, Multivariate Time-Series (MTS) data involves crucial spatial-temporal dependencies, e.g., correlations among sensors. To capture these dependencies, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools, yet their effectiveness is restricted by the quality of graph construction from MTS data. Typically, existing approaches construct graphs solely from MTS signals, which may introduce bias due to a small training dataset and may not accurately represent underlying dependencies. To address this challenge, we propose a novel framework named K-Link, leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to encode extensive general knowledge and thereby providing effective solutions to reduce the bias. Leveraging the knowledge embedded in LLMs, such as physical principles, we extract a \textit{Knowledge-Link graph}, capturing vast semantic knowledge of sensors and the linkage of the sensor-level knowledge. To harness the potential of the knowledge-link graph in enhancing the graph derived from MTS data, we propose a graph alignment module, facilitating the transfer of semantic knowledge within the knowledge-link graph into the MTS-derived graph. By doing so, we can improve the graph quality, ensuring effective representation learning with GNNs for MTS data. Extensive experiments demonstrate the efficacy of our approach for superior performance across various MTS-related downstream tasks.
A Survey on Applications of Reinforcement Learning in Spatial Resource Allocation
Authors: Di Zhang, Moyang Wang, Joseph Mango, Xiang Li, Xianrui Xu
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Sequential Decision Making

The challenge of spatial resource allocation is pervasive across various domains such as transportation, industry, and daily life. As the scale of real-world issues continues to expand and demands for real-time solutions increase, traditional algorithms face significant computational pressures, struggling to achieve optimal efficiency and real-time capabilities. In recent years, with the escalating computational power of computers, the remarkable achievements of reinforcement learning in domains like Go and robotics have demonstrated its robust learning and sequential decision-making capabilities. Given these advancements, there has been a surge in novel methods employing reinforcement learning to tackle spatial resource allocation problems. These methods exhibit advantages such as rapid solution convergence and strong model generalization abilities, offering a new perspective on resolving spatial resource allocation problems. Therefore, this paper aims to summarize and review recent theoretical methods and applied research utilizing reinforcement learning to address spatial resource allocation problems. It provides a summary and comprehensive overview of its fundamental principles, related methodologies, and applied research. Additionally, it highlights several unresolved issues that urgently require attention in this direction for the future.
Apollo: A Lightweight Multilingual Medical LLM towards Democratizing Medical AI to 6B People
Authors: Xidong Wang, Nuo Chen, Junyin Chen, Yidong Wang, Guorui Zhen, Chunxian Zhang, Xiangbo Wu, Yan Hu, Anningzhe Gao, Xiang Wan, Haizhou Li, Benyou Wang
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00

Despite the vast repository of global medical knowledge predominantly being in English, local languages are crucial for delivering tailored healthcare services, particularly in areas with limited medical resources. To extend the reach of medical AI advancements to a broader population, we aim to develop medical LLMs across the six most widely spoken languages, encompassing a global population of 6.1 billion. This effort culminates in the creation of the ApolloCorpora multilingual medical dataset and the XMedBench benchmark. In the multilingual medical benchmark, the released Apollo models, at various relatively-small sizes (i.e., 0.5B, 1.8B, 2B, 6B, and 7B), achieve the best performance among models of equivalent size. Especially, Apollo-7B is the state-of-the-art multilingual medical LLMs up to 70B. Additionally, these lite models could be used to improve the multi-lingual medical capabilities of larger models without fine-tuning in a proxy-tuning fashion. We will open-source training corpora, code, model weights and evaluation benchmark.
SheetAgent: Towards A Generalist Agent for Spreadsheet Reasoning and Manipulation via Large Language Models
Authors: Yibin Chen, Yifu Yuan, Zeyu Zhang, Yan Zheng, Jinyi Liu, Fei Ni, Jianye Hao
Date: 2024-03-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Robot Task Planning

Spreadsheet manipulation is widely existing in most daily works and significantly improves working efficiency. Large language model (LLM) has been recently attempted for automatic spreadsheet manipulation but has not yet been investigated in complicated and realistic tasks where reasoning challenges exist (e.g., long horizon manipulation with multi-step reasoning and ambiguous requirements). To bridge the gap with the real-world requirements, we introduce $\textbf{SheetRM}$, a benchmark featuring long-horizon and multi-category tasks with reasoning-dependent manipulation caused by real-life challenges. To mitigate the above challenges, we further propose $\textbf{SheetAgent}$, a novel autonomous agent that utilizes the power of LLMs. SheetAgent consists of three collaborative modules: $\textit{Planner}$, $\textit{Informer}$, and $\textit{Retriever}$, achieving both advanced reasoning and accurate manipulation over spreadsheets without human interaction through iterative task reasoning and reflection. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SheetAgent delivers 20-30% pass rate improvements on multiple benchmarks over baselines, achieving enhanced precision in spreadsheet manipulation and demonstrating superior table reasoning abilities. More details and visualizations are available at https://sheetagent.github.io.