pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Understanding Epistemic Language with a Language-augmented Bayesian Theory of Mind
Authors: Lance Ying, Tan Zhi-Xuan, Lionel Wong, Vikash Mansinghka, Joshua B. Tenenbaum
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

How do people understand and evaluate claims about others' beliefs, even though these beliefs cannot be directly observed? In this paper, we introduce a cognitive model of epistemic language interpretation, grounded in Bayesian inferences about other agents' goals, beliefs, and intentions: a language-augmented Bayesian theory-of-mind (LaBToM). By translating natural language into an epistemic ``language-of-thought'' with grammar-constrained LLM decoding, then evaluating these translations against the inferences produced by inverting a generative model of rational action and perception, LaBToM captures graded plausibility judgments of epistemic claims. We validate our model in an experiment where participants watch an agent navigate a maze to find keys hidden in boxes needed to reach their goal, then rate sentences about the agent's beliefs. In contrast with multimodal LLMs (GPT-4o, Gemini Pro) and ablated models, our model correlates highly with human judgments for a wide range of expressions, including modal language, uncertainty expressions, knowledge claims, likelihood comparisons, and attributions of false belief.
Does It Look Sequential? An Analysis of Datasets for Evaluation of Sequential Recommendations
Authors: Anton Klenitskiy, Anna Volodkevich, Anton Pembek, Alexey Vasilev
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Sequential recommender systems are an important and demanded area of research. Such systems aim to use the order of interactions in a user's history to predict future interactions. The premise is that the order of interactions and sequential patterns play an essential role. Therefore, it is crucial to use datasets that exhibit a sequential structure to evaluate sequential recommenders properly. We apply several methods based on the random shuffling of the user's sequence of interactions to assess the strength of sequential structure across 15 datasets, frequently used for sequential recommender systems evaluation in recent research papers presented at top-tier conferences. As shuffling explicitly breaks sequential dependencies inherent in datasets, we estimate the strength of sequential patterns by comparing metrics for shuffled and original versions of the dataset. Our findings show that several popular datasets have a rather weak sequential structure.
QuaCK-TSF: Quantum-Classical Kernelized Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Abdallah Aaraba, Soumaya Cherkaoui, Ola Ahmad, Jean-Frédéric Laprade, Olivier Nahman-Lévesque, Alexis Vieloszynski, Shengrui Wang
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Forecasting in probabilistic time series is a complex endeavor that extends beyond predicting future values to also quantifying the uncertainty inherent in these predictions. Gaussian process regression stands out as a Bayesian machine learning technique adept at addressing this multifaceted challenge. This paper introduces a novel approach that blends the robustness of this Bayesian technique with the nuanced insights provided by the kernel perspective on quantum models, aimed at advancing quantum kernelized probabilistic forecasting. We incorporate a quantum feature map inspired by Ising interactions and demonstrate its effectiveness in capturing the temporal dependencies critical for precise forecasting. The optimization of our model's hyperparameters circumvents the need for computationally intensive gradient descent by employing gradient-free Bayesian optimization. Comparative benchmarks against established classical kernel models are provided, affirming that our quantum-enhanced approach achieves competitive performance.
SimBench: A Rule-Based Multi-Turn Interaction Benchmark for Evaluating an LLM's Ability to Generate Digital Twins
Authors: Jingquan Wang, Harry Zhang, Huzaifa Mustafa Unjhawala, Peter Negrut, Shu Wang, Khailanii Slaton, Radu Serban, Jin-Long Wu, Dan Negrut
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

We introduce SimBench, a benchmark designed to evaluate the proficiency of student large language models (S-LLMs) in generating digital twins (DTs) that can be used in simulators for virtual testing. Given a collection of S-LLMs, this benchmark enables the ranking of the S-LLMs based on their ability to produce high-quality DTs. We demonstrate this by comparing over 20 open- and closed-source S-LLMs. Using multi-turn interactions, SimBench employs a rule-based judge LLM (J-LLM) that leverages both predefined rules and human-in-the-loop guidance to assign scores for the DTs generated by the S-LLM, thus providing a consistent and expert-inspired evaluation protocol. The J-LLM is specific to a simulator, and herein the proposed benchmarking approach is demonstrated in conjunction with the Chrono multi-physics simulator. Chrono provided the backdrop used to assess an S-LLM in relation to the latter's ability to create digital twins for multibody dynamics, finite element analysis, vehicle dynamics, robotic dynamics, and sensor simulations. The proposed benchmarking principle is broadly applicable and enables the assessment of an S-LLM's ability to generate digital twins for other simulation packages. All code and data are available at https://github.com/uwsbel/SimBench.
Chemical Reaction Neural Networks for Fitting Accelerating Rate Calorimetry Data
Authors: Saakaar Bhatnagar, Andrew Comerford, Zelu Xu, Davide Berti Polato, Araz Banaeizadeh, Alessandro Ferraris
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC

As the demand for lithium-ion batteries rapidly increases there is a need to design these cells in a safe manner to mitigate thermal runaway. Thermal runaway in batteries leads to an uncontrollable temperature rise and potentially fires, which is a major safety concern. Typically, when modelling the chemical kinetics of thermal runaway calorimetry data ( e.g. Accelerating Rate Calorimetry (ARC)) is needed to determine the temperature-driven decomposition kinetics. Conventional methods of fitting Arrhenius Ordinary Differential Equation (ODE) thermal runaway models to Accelerated Rate Calorimetry (ARC) data make several assumptions that reduce the fidelity and generalizability of the obtained model. In this paper, Chemical Reaction Neural Networks (CRNNs) are trained to fit the kinetic parameters of N-equation Arrhenius ODEs to ARC data obtained from a Molicel 21700 P45B. The models are found to be better approximations of the experimental data. The flexibility of the method is demonstrated by experimenting with two-equation and four-equation models. Thermal runaway simulations are conducted in 3D using the obtained kinetic parameters, showing the applicability of the obtained thermal runaway models to large-scale simulations.
Only Strict Saddles in the Energy Landscape of Predictive Coding Networks?
Authors: Francesco Innocenti, El Mehdi Achour, Ryan Singh, Christopher L. Buckley
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00

Predictive coding (PC) is an energy-based learning algorithm that performs iterative inference over network activities before updating weights. Recent work suggests that PC can converge in fewer learning steps than backpropagation thanks to its inference procedure. However, these advantages are not always observed, and the impact of PC inference on learning is not theoretically well understood. Here, we study the geometry of the PC energy landscape at the inference equilibrium of the network activities. For deep linear networks, we first show that the equilibrated energy is simply a rescaled mean squared error loss with a weight-dependent rescaling. We then prove that many highly degenerate (non-strict) saddles of the loss including the origin become much easier to escape (strict) in the equilibrated energy. Our theory is validated by experiments on both linear and non-linear networks. Based on these and other results, we conjecture that all the saddles of the equilibrated energy are strict. Overall, this work suggests that PC inference makes the loss landscape more benign and robust to vanishing gradients, while also highlighting the fundamental challenge of scaling PC to deeper models.
Sentiment and Emotion-aware Multi-criteria Fuzzy Group Decision Making System
Authors: Adilet Yerkin, Pakizar Shamoi, Elnara Kadyrgali
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Emotion Recognition

In today's world, making decisions as a group is common, whether choosing a restaurant or deciding on a holiday destination. Group decision-making (GDM) systems play a crucial role by facilitating consensus among participants with diverse preferences. Discussions are one of the main tools people use to make decisions. When people discuss alternatives, they use natural language to express their opinions. Traditional GDM systems generally require participants to provide explicit opinion values to the system. However, in real-life scenarios, participants often express their opinions through some text (e.g., in comments, social media, messengers, etc.). This paper introduces a sentiment and emotion-aware multi-criteria fuzzy GDM system designed to enhance consensus-reaching effectiveness in group settings. This system incorporates natural language processing to analyze sentiments and emotions expressed in textual data, enabling an understanding of participant opinions besides the explicit numerical preference inputs. Once all the experts have provided their preferences for the alternatives, the individual preferences are aggregated into a single collective preference matrix. This matrix represents the collective expert opinion regarding the other options. Then, sentiments, emotions, and preference scores are inputted into a fuzzy inference system to get the overall score. The proposed system was used for a small decision-making process - choosing the hotel for a vacation by a group of friends. Our findings demonstrate that integrating sentiment and emotion analysis into GDM systems allows everyone's feelings and opinions to be considered during discussions and significantly improves consensus among participants.
Real-Time Incremental Explanations for Object Detectors
Authors: Santiago Calderón-Peña, Hana Chockler, David A. Kelly
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Existing black box explainability tools for object detectors rely on multiple calls to the model, which prevents them from computing explanations in real time. In this paper we introduce IncX, an algorithm for real-time incremental approximations of explanations, based on linear transformations of saliency maps. We implement IncX on top of D-RISE, a state-of-the-art black-box explainability tool for object detectors. We show that IncX's explanations are comparable in quality to those of D-RISE, with insertion curves being within 8%, and are computed two orders of magnitude faster that D-RISE's explanations.
Advances in Preference-based Reinforcement Learning: A Review
Authors: Youssef Abdelkareem, Shady Shehata, Fakhri Karray
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Reinforcement Learning (RL) algorithms suffer from the dependency on accurately engineered reward functions to properly guide the learning agents to do the required tasks. Preference-based reinforcement learning (PbRL) addresses that by utilizing human preferences as feedback from the experts instead of numeric rewards. Due to its promising advantage over traditional RL, PbRL has gained more focus in recent years with many significant advances. In this survey, we present a unified PbRL framework to include the newly emerging approaches that improve the scalability and efficiency of PbRL. In addition, we give a detailed overview of the theoretical guarantees and benchmarking work done in the field, while presenting its recent applications in complex real-world tasks. Lastly, we go over the limitations of the current approaches and the proposed future research directions.
Matmul or No Matmal in the Era of 1-bit LLMs
Authors: Jinendra Malekar, Mohammed E. Elbtity, Ramtin Zand
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

The advent of 1-bit large language models (LLMs) has attracted considerable attention and opened up new research opportunities. However, 1-bit LLMs only improve a fraction of models by applying extreme quantization to the projection layers while leaving attention heads unchanged. Therefore, to avoid fundamentally wrong choices of goals in future research, it is crucial to understand the actual improvements in computation and memory usage that 1-bit LLMs can deliver. In this work, we present an adaptation of Amdahl's Law tailored for the 1-bit LLM context, which illustrates how partial improvements in 1-bit LLMs impact overall model performance. Through extensive experiments, we uncover key nuances across different model architectures and hardware configurations, offering a roadmap for future research in the era of 1-bit LLMs.
Estimating Contribution Quality in Online Deliberations Using a Large Language Model
Authors: Lodewijk Gelauff, Mohak Goyal, Bhargav Dindukurthi, Ashish Goel, Alice Siu
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Deliberation involves participants exchanging knowledge, arguments, and perspectives and has been shown to be effective at addressing polarization. The Stanford Online Deliberation Platform facilitates large-scale deliberations. It enables video-based online discussions on a structured agenda for small groups without requiring human moderators. This paper's data comes from various deliberation events, including one conducted in collaboration with Meta in 32 countries, and another with 38 post-secondary institutions in the US. Estimating the quality of contributions in a conversation is crucial for assessing feature and intervention impacts. Traditionally, this is done by human annotators, which is time-consuming and costly. We use a large language model (LLM) alongside eight human annotators to rate contributions based on justification, novelty, expansion of the conversation, and potential for further expansion, with scores ranging from 1 to 5. Annotators also provide brief justifications for their ratings. Using the average rating from other human annotators as the ground truth, we find the model outperforms individual human annotators. While pairs of human annotators outperform the model in rating justification and groups of three outperform it on all four metrics, the model remains competitive. We illustrate the usefulness of the automated quality rating by assessing the effect of nudges on the quality of deliberation. We first observe that individual nudges after prolonged inactivity are highly effective, increasing the likelihood of the individual requesting to speak in the next 30 seconds by 65%. Using our automated quality estimation, we show that the quality ratings for statements prompted by nudging are similar to those made without nudging, signifying that nudging leads to more ideas being generated in the conversation without losing overall quality.
Explainable Anomaly Detection: Counterfactual driven What-If Analysis
Authors: Logan Cummins, Alexander Sommers, Sudip Mittal, Shahram Rahimi, Maria Seale, Joseph Jaboure, Thomas Arnold
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, counterfactual, Explainable artificial intelligence, Fault Diagnosis

There exists three main areas of study inside of the field of predictive maintenance: anomaly detection, fault diagnosis, and remaining useful life prediction. Notably, anomaly detection alerts the stakeholder that an anomaly is occurring. This raises two fundamental questions: what is causing the fault and how can we fix it? Inside of the field of explainable artificial intelligence, counterfactual explanations can give that information in the form of what changes to make to put the data point into the opposing class, in this case "healthy". The suggestions are not always actionable which may raise the interest in asking "what if we do this instead?" In this work, we provide a proof of concept for utilizing counterfactual explanations as what-if analysis. We perform this on the PRONOSTIA dataset with a temporal convolutional network as the anomaly detector. Our method presents the counterfactuals in the form of a what-if analysis for this base problem to inspire future work for more complex systems and scenarios.
An Open Knowledge Graph-Based Approach for Mapping Concepts and Requirements between the EU AI Act and International Standards
Authors: Julio Hernandez, Delaram Golpayegani, Dave Lewis
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Navigate

The many initiatives on trustworthy AI result in a confusing and multipolar landscape that organizations operating within the fluid and complex international value chains must navigate in pursuing trustworthy AI. The EU's AI Act will now shift the focus of such organizations toward conformance with the technical requirements for regulatory compliance, for which the Act relies on Harmonized Standards. Though a high-level mapping to the Act's requirements will be part of such harmonization, determining the degree to which standards conformity delivers regulatory compliance with the AI Act remains a complex challenge. Variance and gaps in the definitions of concepts and how they are used in requirements between the Act and harmonized standards may impact the consistency of compliance claims across organizations, sectors, and applications. This may present regulatory uncertainty, especially for SMEs and public sector bodies relying on standards conformance rather than proprietary equivalents for developing and deploying compliant high-risk AI systems. To address this challenge, this paper offers a simple and repeatable mechanism for mapping the terms and requirements relevant to normative statements in regulations and standards, e.g., AI Act and ISO management system standards, texts into open knowledge graphs. This representation is used to assess the adequacy of standards conformance to regulatory compliance and thereby provide a basis for identifying areas where further technical consensus development in trustworthy AI value chains is required to achieve regulatory compliance.
Neural Symbolic Logical Rule Learner for Interpretable Learning
Authors: Bowen Wei, Ziwei Zhu
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, Negation

Rule-based neural networks stand out for enabling interpretable classification by learning logical rules for both prediction and interpretation. However, existing models often lack flexibility due to the fixed model structure. Addressing this, we introduce the Normal Form Rule Learner (NFRL) algorithm, leveraging a selective discrete neural network, that treat weight parameters as hard selectors, to learn rules in both Conjunctive Normal Form (CNF) and Disjunctive Normal Form (DNF) for enhanced accuracy and interpretability. Instead of adopting a deep, complex structure, the NFRL incorporates two specialized Normal Form Layers (NFLs) with adaptable AND/OR neurons, a Negation Layer for input negations, and a Normal Form Constraint (NFC) to streamline neuron connections. We also show the novel network architecture can be optimized using adaptive gradient update together with Straight-Through Estimator to overcome the gradient vanishing challenge. Through extensive experiments on 11 datasets, NFRL demonstrates superior classification performance, quality of learned rules, efficiency and interpretability compared to 12 state-of-the-art alternatives. Code and data are available at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/NFRL-27B4/}.
Why am I Still Seeing This: Measuring the Effectiveness Of Ad Controls and Explanations in AI-Mediated Ad Targeting Systems
Authors: Jane Castleman, Aleksandra Korolova
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00

Recently, Meta has shifted towards AI-mediated ad targeting mechanisms that do not require advertisers to provide detailed targeting criteria, likely driven by excitement over AI capabilities as well as new data privacy policies and targeting changes agreed upon in civil rights settlements. At the same time, Meta has touted their ad preference controls as an effective mechanism for users to control the ads they see. Furthermore, Meta markets their targeting explanations as a transparency tool that allows users to understand why they saw certain ads and inform actions to control future ads. Our study evaluates the effectiveness of Meta's "See less" ad control and the actionability of ad targeting explanations following the shift to AI-mediated targeting. We conduct a large-scale study, randomly assigning participants to mark "See less" to Body Weight Control or Parenting topics, and collecting the ads and targeting explanations Meta shows to participants before and after the intervention. We find that utilizing the "See less" ad control for the topics we study does not significantly reduce the number of ads shown by Meta on these topics, and that the control is less effective for some users whose demographics are correlated with the topic. Furthermore, we find that the majority of ad targeting explanations for local ads made no reference to location-specific targeting criteria, and did not inform users why ads related to the topics they marked to "See less" of continued to be delivered. We hypothesize that the poor effectiveness of controls and lack of actionability in explanations are the result of the shift to AI-mediated targeting, for which explainability and transparency tools have not yet been developed. Our work thus provides evidence for the need of new methods for transparency and user control, suitable and reflective of increasingly complex AI-mediated ad delivery systems.
DreamCinema: Cinematic Transfer with Free Camera and 3D Character
Authors: Weiliang Chen, Fangfu Liu, Diankun Wu, Haowen Sun, Haixu Song, Yueqi Duan
Date: 2024-08-22 00:00:00

We are living in a flourishing era of digital media, where everyone has the potential to become a personal filmmaker. Current research on cinematic transfer empowers filmmakers to reproduce and manipulate the visual elements (e.g., cinematography and character behaviors) from classic shots. However, characters in the reimagined films still rely on manual crafting, which involves significant technical complexity and high costs, making it unattainable for ordinary users. Furthermore, their estimated cinematography lacks smoothness due to inadequate capturing of inter-frame motion and modeling of physical trajectories. Fortunately, the remarkable success of 2D and 3D AIGC has opened up the possibility of efficiently generating characters tailored to users' needs, diversifying cinematography. In this paper, we propose DreamCinema, a novel cinematic transfer framework that pioneers generative AI into the film production paradigm, aiming at facilitating user-friendly film creation. Specifically, we first extract cinematic elements (i.e., human and camera pose) and optimize the camera trajectory. Then, we apply a character generator to efficiently create 3D high-quality characters with a human structure prior. Finally, we develop a structure-guided motion transfer strategy to incorporate generated characters into film creation and transfer it via 3D graphics engines smoothly. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our method for creating high-quality films with free camera and 3D characters.