pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
A Rhetorical Relations-Based Framework for Tailored Multimedia Document Summarization
Authors: Azze-Eddine Maredj, Madjid Sadallah
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Summarization, graph construction

In the rapidly evolving landscape of digital content, the task of summarizing multimedia documents, which encompass textual, visual, and auditory elements, presents intricate challenges. These challenges include extracting pertinent information from diverse formats, maintaining the structural integrity and semantic coherence of the original content, and generating concise yet informative summaries. This paper introduces a novel framework for multimedia document summarization that capitalizes on the inherent structure of the document to craft coherent and succinct summaries. Central to this framework is the incorporation of a rhetorical structure for structural analysis, augmented by a graph-based representation to facilitate the extraction of pivotal information. Weighting algorithms are employed to assign significance values to document units, thereby enabling effective ranking and selection of relevant content. Furthermore, the framework is designed to accommodate user preferences and time constraints, ensuring the production of personalized and contextually relevant summaries. The summarization process is elaborately delineated, encompassing document specification, graph construction, unit weighting, and summary extraction, supported by illustrative examples and algorithmic elucidation. This proposed framework represents a significant advancement in automatic summarization, with broad potential applications across multimedia document processing, promising transformative impacts in the field.
Generalized Uncertainty-Based Evidential Fusion with Hybrid Multi-Head Attention for Weak-Supervised Temporal Action Localization
Authors: Yuanpeng He, Lijian Li, Tianxiang Zhan, Wenpin Jiao, Chi-Man Pun
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Localization, Optical Flow Estimation, Temporal Action Localization, Weakly-supervised Temporal Action Localization

Weakly supervised temporal action localization (WS-TAL) is a task of targeting at localizing complete action instances and categorizing them with video-level labels. Action-background ambiguity, primarily caused by background noise resulting from aggregation and intra-action variation, is a significant challenge for existing WS-TAL methods. In this paper, we introduce a hybrid multi-head attention (HMHA) module and generalized uncertainty-based evidential fusion (GUEF) module to address the problem. The proposed HMHA effectively enhances RGB and optical flow features by filtering redundant information and adjusting their feature distribution to better align with the WS-TAL task. Additionally, the proposed GUEF adaptively eliminates the interference of background noise by fusing snippet-level evidences to refine uncertainty measurement and select superior foreground feature information, which enables the model to concentrate on integral action instances to achieve better action localization and classification performance. Experimental results conducted on the THUMOS14 dataset demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods. Our code is available in \url{https://github.com/heyuanpengpku/GUEF/tree/main}.
TravelAgent: Generative Agents in the Built Environment
Authors: Ariel Noyman, Kai Hu, Kent Larson
Date: 2024-12-25 00:00:00

Understanding human behavior in built environments is critical for designing functional, user centered urban spaces. Traditional approaches, such as manual observations, surveys, and simplified simulations, often fail to capture the complexity and dynamics of real world behavior. To address these limitations, we introduce TravelAgent, a novel simulation platform that models pedestrian navigation and activity patterns across diverse indoor and outdoor environments under varying contextual and environmental conditions. TravelAgent leverages generative agents integrated into 3D virtual environments, enabling agents to process multimodal sensory inputs and exhibit human-like decision-making, behavior, and adaptation. Through experiments, including navigation, wayfinding, and free exploration, we analyze data from 100 simulations comprising 1898 agent steps across diverse spatial layouts and agent archetypes, achieving an overall task completion rate of 76%. Using spatial, linguistic, and sentiment analyses, we show how agents perceive, adapt to, or struggle with their surroundings and assigned tasks. Our findings highlight the potential of TravelAgent as a tool for urban design, spatial cognition research, and agent-based modeling. We discuss key challenges and opportunities in deploying generative agents for the evaluation and refinement of spatial designs, proposing TravelAgent as a new paradigm for simulating and understanding human experiences in built environments.
MapExplorer: New Content Generation from Low-Dimensional Visualizations
Authors: Xingjian Zhang, Ziyang Xiong, Shixuan Liu, Yutong Xie, Tolga Ergen, Dongsub Shim, Hua Xu, Honglak Lee, Qiaozhu Me
Date: 2024-12-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

Low-dimensional visualizations, or "projection maps," are widely used in scientific and creative domains to interpret large-scale and complex datasets. These visualizations not only aid in understanding existing knowledge spaces but also implicitly guide exploration into unknown areas. Although techniques such as t-SNE and UMAP can generate these maps, there exists no systematic method for leveraging them to generate new content. To address this, we introduce MapExplorer, a novel knowledge discovery task that translates coordinates within any projection map into coherent, contextually aligned textual content. This allows users to interactively explore and uncover insights embedded in the maps. To evaluate the performance of MapExplorer methods, we propose Atometric, a fine-grained metric inspired by ROUGE that quantifies logical coherence and alignment between generated and reference text. Experiments on diverse datasets demonstrate the versatility of MapExplorer in generating scientific hypotheses, crafting synthetic personas, and devising strategies for attacking large language models-even with simple baseline methods. By bridging visualization and generation, our work highlights the potential of MapExplorer to enable intuitive human-AI collaboration in large-scale data exploration.
Comparing Few to Rank Many: Active Human Preference Learning using Randomized Frank-Wolfe
Authors: Kiran Koshy Thekumparampil, Gaurush Hiranandani, Kousha Kalantari, Shoham Sabach, Branislav Kveton
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00

We study learning of human preferences from a limited comparison feedback. This task is ubiquitous in machine learning. Its applications such as reinforcement learning from human feedback, have been transformational. We formulate this problem as learning a Plackett-Luce model over a universe of $N$ choices from $K$-way comparison feedback, where typically $K \ll N$. Our solution is the D-optimal design for the Plackett-Luce objective. The design defines a data logging policy that elicits comparison feedback for a small collection of optimally chosen points from all ${N \choose K}$ feasible subsets. The main algorithmic challenge in this work is that even fast methods for solving D-optimal designs would have $O({N \choose K})$ time complexity. To address this issue, we propose a randomized Frank-Wolfe (FW) algorithm that solves the linear maximization sub-problems in the FW method on randomly chosen variables. We analyze the algorithm, and evaluate it empirically on synthetic and open-source NLP datasets.
An In-Depth Analysis of Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation for Digit Classification
Authors: Eugene Choi, Julian Rodriguez, Edmund Young
Date: 2024-12-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Domain Adaptation, domain classification, image-classification, Image Classification

Domain adaptation is an active area of research driven by the growing demand for robust machine learning models that perform well on real-world data. Adversarial learning for deep neural networks (DNNs) has emerged as a promising approach to improving generalization ability, particularly for image classification. In this paper, we implement a specific adversarial learning technique known as Adversarial Discriminative Domain Adaptation (ADDA) and replicate digit classification experiments from the original ADDA paper. We extend their findings by examining a broader range of domain shifts and provide a detailed analysis of in-domain classification accuracy post-ADDA. Our results demonstrate that ADDA significantly improves accuracy across certain domain shifts with minimal impact on in-domain performance. Furthermore, we provide qualitative analysis and propose potential explanations for ADDA's limitations in less successful domain shifts. Code is at https://github.com/eugenechoi2004/COS429_FINAL .
FITS: Ensuring Safe and Effective Touchscreen Use in Moving Vehicles
Authors: Daan M. Pool, Yasemin Vardar
Date: 2024-12-24 00:00:00

Touch interfaces are replacing physical buttons, dials, and switches in the new generation of cars, aircraft, and vessels. However, vehicle vibrations and accelerations perturb finger movements and cause erroneous touchscreen inputs by users. Furthermore, unlike physical buttons, touchscreens cannot be operated by touch alone and always require users' visual focus. Hence, despite their numerous benefits, touchscreens are not inherently suited for use in vehicles, which results in an increased risk of accidents. In a recently awarded research project titled "Right Touch Right Time: Future In-vehicle Touchscreens (FITS)", we aim to address these problems by developing novel in-vehicle touchscreens that actively predict and correct perturbed finger movements and simulate physical touch interactions with artificial tactile feedback.
Large Language Models for Market Research: A Data-augmentation Approach
Authors: Mengxin Wang, Dennis J. Zhang, Heng Zhang
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Transfer Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed artificial intelligence by excelling in complex natural language processing tasks. Their ability to generate human-like text has opened new possibilities for market research, particularly in conjoint analysis, where understanding consumer preferences is essential but often resource-intensive. Traditional survey-based methods face limitations in scalability and cost, making LLM-generated data a promising alternative. However, while LLMs have the potential to simulate real consumer behavior, recent studies highlight a significant gap between LLM-generated and human data, with biases introduced when substituting between the two. In this paper, we address this gap by proposing a novel statistical data augmentation approach that efficiently integrates LLM-generated data with real data in conjoint analysis. Our method leverages transfer learning principles to debias the LLM-generated data using a small amount of human data. This results in statistically robust estimators with consistent and asymptotically normal properties, in contrast to naive approaches that simply substitute human data with LLM-generated data, which can exacerbate bias. We validate our framework through an empirical study on COVID-19 vaccine preferences, demonstrating its superior ability to reduce estimation error and save data and costs by 24.9% to 79.8%. In contrast, naive approaches fail to save data due to the inherent biases in LLM-generated data compared to human data. Another empirical study on sports car choices validates the robustness of our results. Our findings suggest that while LLM-generated data is not a direct substitute for human responses, it can serve as a valuable complement when used within a robust statistical framework.
Nationality, Race, and Ethnicity Biases in and Consequences of Detecting AI-Generated Self-Presentations
Authors: Haoran Chu, Linjuan Rita Men, Sixiao Liu, Shupei Yuan, Yuan Sun
Date: 2024-12-24 00:00:00

This study builds on person perception and human AI interaction (HAII) theories to investigate how content and source cues, specifically race, ethnicity, and nationality, affect judgments of AI-generated content in a high-stakes self-presentation context: college applications. Results of a pre-registered experiment with a nationally representative U.S. sample (N = 644) show that content heuristics, such as linguistic style, played a dominant role in AI detection. Source heuristics, such as nationality, also emerged as a significant factor, with international students more likely to be perceived as using AI, especially when their statements included AI-sounding features. Interestingly, Asian and Hispanic applicants were more likely to be judged as AI users when labeled as domestic students, suggesting interactions between racial stereotypes and AI detection. AI attribution led to lower perceptions of personal statement quality and authenticity, as well as negative evaluations of the applicant's competence, sociability, morality, and future success.
On the Expressiveness and Length Generalization of Selective State-Space Models on Regular Languages
Authors: Aleksandar Terzić, Michael Hersche, Giacomo Camposampiero, Thomas Hofmann, Abu Sebastian, Abbas Rahimi
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: State Space Models

Selective state-space models (SSMs) are an emerging alternative to the Transformer, offering the unique advantage of parallel training and sequential inference. Although these models have shown promising performance on a variety of tasks, their formal expressiveness and length generalization properties remain underexplored. In this work, we provide insight into the workings of selective SSMs by analyzing their expressiveness and length generalization performance on regular language tasks, i.e., finite-state automaton (FSA) emulation. We address certain limitations of modern SSM-based architectures by introducing the Selective Dense State-Space Model (SD-SSM), the first selective SSM that exhibits perfect length generalization on a set of various regular language tasks using a single layer. It utilizes a dictionary of dense transition matrices, a softmax selection mechanism that creates a convex combination of dictionary matrices at each time step, and a readout consisting of layer normalization followed by a linear map. We then proceed to evaluate variants of diagonal selective SSMs by considering their empirical performance on commutative and non-commutative automata. We explain the experimental results with theoretical considerations. Our code is available at https://github.com/IBM/selective-dense-state-space-model.
Semi-Supervised Learning from Small Annotated Data and Large Unlabeled Data for Fine-grained PICO Entity Recognition
Authors: Fangyi Chen, Gongbo Zhang, Yilu Fang, Yifan Peng, Chunhua Weng
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Named Entity Recognition (NER), NER, PICO

Objective: Extracting PICO elements -- Participants, Intervention, Comparison, and Outcomes -- from clinical trial literature is essential for clinical evidence retrieval, appraisal, and synthesis. Existing approaches do not distinguish the attributes of PICO entities. This study aims to develop a named entity recognition (NER) model to extract PICO entities with fine granularities. Materials and Methods: Using a corpus of 2,511 abstracts with PICO mentions from 4 public datasets, we developed a semi-supervised method to facilitate the training of a NER model, FinePICO, by combining limited annotated data of PICO entities and abundant unlabeled data. For evaluation, we divided the entire dataset into two subsets: a smaller group with annotations and a larger group without annotations. We then established the theoretical lower and upper performance bounds based on the performance of supervised learning models trained solely on the small, annotated subset and on the entire set with complete annotations, respectively. Finally, we evaluated FinePICO on both the smaller annotated subset and the larger, initially unannotated subset. We measured the performance of FinePICO using precision, recall, and F1. Results: Our method achieved precision/recall/F1 of 0.567/0.636/0.60, respectively, using a small set of annotated samples, outperforming the baseline model (F1: 0.437) by more than 16\%. The model demonstrates generalizability to a different PICO framework and to another corpus, which consistently outperforms the benchmark in diverse experimental settings (p-value \textless0.001). Conclusion: This study contributes a generalizable and effective semi-supervised approach to named entity recognition leveraging large unlabeled data together with small, annotated data. It also initially supports fine-grained PICO extraction.
A Reinforcement Learning-Based Task Mapping Method to Improve the Reliability of Clustered Manycores
Authors: Fatemeh Hossein-Khani, Omid Akbari
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Q-Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The increasing scale of manycore systems poses significant challenges in managing reliability while meeting performance demands. Simultaneously, these systems become more susceptible to different aging mechanisms such as negative-bias temperature instability (NBTI), hot carrier injection (HCI), and thermal cycling (TC), as well as the electromigration (EM) phenomenon. In this paper, we propose a reinforcement learning (RL)-based task mapping method to improve the reliability of manycore systems considering the aforementioned aging mechanisms, which consists of three steps including bin packing, task-to-bin mapping, and task-to-core mapping. In the initial step, a density-based spatial application with noise (DBSCAN) clustering method is employed to compose some clusters (bins) based on the cores temperature. Then, the Q-learning algorithm is used for the two latter steps, to map the arrived task on a core such that the minimum thermal variation is occurred among all the bins. Compared to the state-of-the-art works, the proposed method is performed during runtime without requiring any parameter to be calculated offline. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is evaluated on 16, 32, and 64 cores systems using SPLASH2 and PARSEC benchmark suite applications. The results demonstrate up to 27% increase in the mean time to failure (MTTF) compared to the state-of-the-art task mapping techniques.
CALICO: Part-Focused Semantic Co-Segmentation with Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Kiet A. Nguyen, Adheesh Juvekar, Tianjiao Yu, Muntasir Wahed, Ismini Lourentzou
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recent advances in Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have sparked significant progress in general-purpose vision tasks through visual instruction tuning. While some works have demonstrated the capability of LVLMs to generate segmentation masks that align phrases with natural language descriptions in a single image, they struggle with segmentation-grounded comparisons across multiple images, particularly at finer granularities such as object parts. In this paper, we introduce the new task of part-focused semantic co-segmentation, which seeks to identify and segment common and unique objects and parts across images. To address this task, we present CALICO, the first LVLM that can segment and reason over multiple masks across images, enabling object comparison based on their constituent parts. CALICO features two proposed components, a novel Correspondence Extraction Module, which captures semantic-rich information to identify part-level correspondences between objects, and a Correspondence Adaptation Module, which embeds this information into the LVLM to facilitate multi-image understanding in a parameter-efficient manner. To support training and evaluation, we curate MixedParts, a comprehensive multi-image segmentation dataset containing $\sim$2.4M samples across $\sim$44K images with diverse object and part categories. Experimental results show CALICO, finetuned on only 0.3% of its architecture, achieves robust performance in part-focused semantic co-segmentation.
Performance Control in Early Exiting to Deploy Large Models at the Same Cost of Smaller Ones
Authors: Mehrnaz Mofakhami, Reza Bayat, Ioannis Mitliagkas, Joao Monteiro, Valentina Zantedeschi
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00

Early Exiting (EE) is a promising technique for speeding up inference by adaptively allocating compute resources to data points based on their difficulty. The approach enables predictions to exit at earlier layers for simpler samples while reserving more computation for challenging ones. In this study, we first present a novel perspective on the EE approach, showing that larger models deployed with EE can achieve higher performance than smaller models while maintaining similar computational costs. As existing EE approaches rely on confidence estimation at each exit point, we further study the impact of overconfidence on the controllability of the compute-performance trade-off. We introduce Performance Control Early Exiting (PCEE), a method that enables accuracy thresholding by basing decisions not on a data point's confidence but on the average accuracy of samples with similar confidence levels from a held-out validation set. In our experiments, we show that PCEE offers a simple yet computationally efficient approach that provides better control over performance than standard confidence-based approaches, and allows us to scale up model sizes to yield performance gain while reducing the computational cost.
A novel framework for MCDM based on Z numbers and soft likelihood function
Authors: Yuanpeng He
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The optimization on the structure of process of information management under uncertain environment has attracted lots of attention from researchers around the world. Nevertheless, how to obtain accurate and rational evaluation from assessments produced by experts is still an open problem. Specially, intuitionistic fuzzy set provides an effective solution in handling indeterminate information. And Yager proposes a novel method for fusion of probabilistic evidence to handle uncertain and conflicting information lately which is called soft likelihood function. This paper devises a novel framework of soft likelihood function based on information volume of fuzzy membership and credibility measure for extracting truly useful and valuable information from uncertainty. An application is provided to verify the validity and correctness of the proposed framework. Besides, the comparisons with other existing methods further demonstrate the superiority of the novel framework of soft likelihood function.
From Interests to Insights: An LLM Approach to Course Recommendations Using Natural Language Queries
Authors: Hugh Van Deventer, Mark Mills, August Evrard
Date: 2024-12-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Natural Language Queries, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Most universities in the United States encourage their students to explore academic areas before declaring a major and to acquire academic breadth by satisfying a variety of requirements. Each term, students must choose among many thousands of offerings, spanning dozens of subject areas, a handful of courses to take. The curricular environment is also dynamic, and poor communication and search functions on campus can limit a student's ability to discover new courses of interest. To support both students and their advisers in such a setting, we explore a novel Large Language Model (LLM) course recommendation system that applies a Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) method to the corpus of course descriptions. The system first generates an 'ideal' course description based on the user's query. This description is converted into a search vector using embeddings, which is then used to find actual courses with similar content by comparing embedding similarities. We describe the method and assess the quality and fairness of some example prompts. Steps to deploy a pilot system on campus are discussed.