pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Federated Knowledge Transfer Fine-tuning Large Server Model with Resource-Constrained IoT Clients
Authors: Shaoyuan Chen, Linlin You, Rui Liu, Shuo Yu, Ahmed M. Abdelmoniem
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Knowledge Distillation, Privacy Preserving, Transfer Learning

The training of large models, involving fine-tuning, faces the scarcity of high-quality data. Compared to the solutions based on centralized data centers, updating large models in the Internet of Things (IoT) faces challenges in coordinating knowledge from distributed clients by using their private and heterogeneous data. To tackle such a challenge, we propose KOALA (Federated Knowledge Transfer Fine-tuning Large Server Model with Resource-Constrained IoT Clients) to impel the training of large models in IoT. Since the resources obtained by IoT clients are limited and restricted, it is infeasible to locally execute large models and also update them in a privacy-preserving manner. Therefore, we leverage federated learning and knowledge distillation to update large models through collaboration with their small models, which can run locally at IoT clients to process their private data separately and enable large-small model knowledge transfer through iterative learning between the server and clients. Moreover, to support clients with similar or different computing capacities, KOALA is designed with two kinds of large-small model joint learning modes, namely to be homogeneous or heterogeneous. Experimental results demonstrate that compared to the conventional approach, our method can not only achieve similar training performance but also significantly reduce the need for local storage and computing power resources.
CLAMP-ViT: Contrastive Data-Free Learning for Adaptive Post-Training Quantization of ViTs
Authors: Akshat Ramachandran, Souvik Kundu, Tushar Krishna
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, object-detection, Object Detection, Quantization

We present CLAMP-ViT, a data-free post-training quantization method for vision transformers (ViTs). We identify the limitations of recent techniques, notably their inability to leverage meaningful inter-patch relationships, leading to the generation of simplistic and semantically vague data, impacting quantization accuracy. CLAMP-ViT employs a two-stage approach, cyclically adapting between data generation and model quantization. Specifically, we incorporate a patch-level contrastive learning scheme to generate richer, semantically meaningful data. Furthermore, we leverage contrastive learning in layer-wise evolutionary search for fixed- and mixed-precision quantization to identify optimal quantization parameters while mitigating the effects of a non-smooth loss landscape. Extensive evaluations across various vision tasks demonstrate the superiority of CLAMP-ViT, with performance improvements of up to 3% in top-1 accuracy for classification, 0.6 mAP for object detection, and 1.5 mIoU for segmentation at similar or better compression ratio over existing alternatives. Code is available at https://github.com/georgia-tech-synergy-lab/CLAMP-ViT.git
FastSpiker: Enabling Fast Training for Spiking Neural Networks on Event-based Data through Learning Rate Enhancements for Autonomous Embedded Systems
Authors: Iqra Bano, Rachmad Vidya Wicaksana Putra, Alberto Marchisio, Muhammad Shafique
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00

Autonomous embedded systems (e.g., robots) typically necessitate intelligent computation with low power/energy processing for completing their tasks. Such requirements can be fulfilled by embodied neuromorphic intelligence with spiking neural networks (SNNs) because of their high learning quality (e.g., accuracy) and sparse computation. Here, the employment of event-based data is preferred to ensure seamless connectivity between input and processing parts. However, state-of-the-art SNNs still face a long training time to achieve high accuracy, thereby incurring high energy consumption and producing a high rate of carbon emission. Toward this, we propose FastSpiker, a novel methodology that enables fast SNN training on event-based data through learning rate enhancements targeting autonomous embedded systems. In FastSpiker, we first investigate the impact of different learning rate policies and their values, then select the ones that quickly offer high accuracy. Afterward, we explore different settings for the selected learning rate policies to find the appropriate policies through a statistical-based decision. Experimental results show that our FastSpiker offers up to 10.5x faster training time and up to 88.39% lower carbon emission to achieve higher or comparable accuracy to the state-of-the-art on the event-based automotive dataset (i.e., NCARS). In this manner, our FastSpiker methodology paves the way for green and sustainable computing in realizing embodied neuromorphic intelligence for autonomous embedded systems.
Multi-scale Conditional Generative Modeling for Microscopic Image Restoration
Authors: Luzhe Huang, Xiongye Xiao, Shixuan Li, Jiawen Sun, Yi Huang, Aydogan Ozcan, Paul Bogdan
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Generation, Image Restoration

The advance of diffusion-based generative models in recent years has revolutionized state-of-the-art (SOTA) techniques in a wide variety of image analysis and synthesis tasks, whereas their adaptation on image restoration, particularly within computational microscopy remains theoretically and empirically underexplored. In this research, we introduce a multi-scale generative model that enhances conditional image restoration through a novel exploitation of the Brownian Bridge process within wavelet domain. By initiating the Brownian Bridge diffusion process specifically at the lowest-frequency subband and applying generative adversarial networks at subsequent multi-scale high-frequency subbands in the wavelet domain, our method provides significant acceleration during training and sampling while sustaining a high image generation quality and diversity on par with SOTA diffusion models. Experimental results on various computational microscopy and imaging tasks confirm our method's robust performance and its considerable reduction in its sampling steps and time. This pioneering technique offers an efficient image restoration framework that harmonizes efficiency with quality, signifying a major stride in incorporating cutting-edge generative models into computational microscopy workflows.
Unlocking Textual and Visual Wisdom: Open-Vocabulary 3D Object Detection Enhanced by Comprehensive Guidance from Text and Image
Authors: Pengkun Jiao, Na Zhao, Jingjing Chen, Yu-Gang Jiang
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Open-vocabulary 3D object detection (OV-3DDet) aims to localize and recognize both seen and previously unseen object categories within any new 3D scene. While language and vision foundation models have achieved success in handling various open-vocabulary tasks with abundant training data, OV-3DDet faces a significant challenge due to the limited availability of training data. Although some pioneering efforts have integrated vision-language models (VLM) knowledge into OV-3DDet learning, the full potential of these foundational models has yet to be fully exploited. In this paper, we unlock the textual and visual wisdom to tackle the open-vocabulary 3D detection task by leveraging the language and vision foundation models. We leverage a vision foundation model to provide image-wise guidance for discovering novel classes in 3D scenes. Specifically, we utilize a object detection vision foundation model to enable the zero-shot discovery of objects in images, which serves as the initial seeds and filtering guidance to identify novel 3D objects. Additionally, to align the 3D space with the powerful vision-language space, we introduce a hierarchical alignment approach, where the 3D feature space is aligned with the vision-language feature space using a pre-trained VLM at the instance, category, and scene levels. Through extensive experimentation, we demonstrate significant improvements in accuracy and generalization, highlighting the potential of foundation models in advancing open-vocabulary 3D object detection in real-world scenarios.
Some Issues in Predictive Ethics Modeling: An Annotated Contrast Set of "Moral Stories"
Authors: Ben Fitzgerald
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Ethics

Models like Delphi have been able to label ethical dilemmas as moral or immoral with astonishing accuracy. This paper challenges accuracy as a holistic metric for ethics modeling by identifying issues with translating moral dilemmas into text-based input. It demonstrates these issues with contrast sets that substantially reduce the performance of classifiers trained on the dataset Moral Stories. Ultimately, we obtain concrete estimates for how much specific forms of data misrepresentation harm classifier accuracy. Specifically, label-changing tweaks to the descriptive content of a situation (as small as 3-5 words) can reduce classifier accuracy to as low as 51%, almost half the initial accuracy of 99.8%. Associating situations with a misleading social norm lowers accuracy to 98.8%, while adding textual bias (i.e. an implication that a situation already fits a certain label) lowers accuracy to 77%. These results suggest not only that many ethics models have substantially overfit, but that several precautions are required to ensure that input accurately captures a moral dilemma. This paper recommends re-examining the structure of a social norm, training models to ask for context with defeasible reasoning, and filtering input for textual bias. Doing so not only gives us the first concrete estimates of the average cost to accuracy of misrepresenting ethics data, but gives researchers practical tips for considering these estimates in research.
Advancing Prompt Recovery in NLP: A Deep Dive into the Integration of Gemma-2b-it and Phi2 Models
Authors: Jianlong Chen, Wei Xu, Zhicheng Ding, Jinxin Xu, Hao Yan, Xinyu Zhang
Date: 2024-07-07 00:00:00

Prompt recovery, a crucial task in natural language processing, entails the reconstruction of prompts or instructions that language models use to convert input text into a specific output. Although pivotal, the design and effectiveness of prompts represent a challenging and relatively untapped field within NLP research. This paper delves into an exhaustive investigation of prompt recovery methodologies, employing a spectrum of pre-trained language models and strategies. Our study is a comparative analysis aimed at gauging the efficacy of various models on a benchmark dataset, with the goal of pinpointing the most proficient approach for prompt recovery. Through meticulous experimentation and detailed analysis, we elucidate the outstanding performance of the Gemma-2b-it + Phi2 model + Pretrain. This model surpasses its counterparts, showcasing its exceptional capability in accurately reconstructing prompts for text transformation tasks. Our findings offer a significant contribution to the existing knowledge on prompt recovery, shedding light on the intricacies of prompt design and offering insightful perspectives for future innovations in text rewriting and the broader field of natural language processing.
BadCLM: Backdoor Attack in Clinical Language Models for Electronic Health Records
Authors: Weimin Lyu, Zexin Bi, Fusheng Wang, Chao Chen
Date: 2024-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Decision Making, Mortality Prediction

The advent of clinical language models integrated into electronic health records (EHR) for clinical decision support has marked a significant advancement, leveraging the depth of clinical notes for improved decision-making. Despite their success, the potential vulnerabilities of these models remain largely unexplored. This paper delves into the realm of backdoor attacks on clinical language models, introducing an innovative attention-based backdoor attack method, BadCLM (Bad Clinical Language Models). This technique clandestinely embeds a backdoor within the models, causing them to produce incorrect predictions when a pre-defined trigger is present in inputs, while functioning accurately otherwise. We demonstrate the efficacy of BadCLM through an in-hospital mortality prediction task with MIMIC III dataset, showcasing its potential to compromise model integrity. Our findings illuminate a significant security risk in clinical decision support systems and pave the way for future endeavors in fortifying clinical language models against such vulnerabilities.
Harnessing the Power of LLMs: Automating Unit Test Generation for High-Performance Computing
Authors: Rabimba Karanjai, Aftab Hussain, Md Rafiqul Islam Rabin, Lei Xu, Weidong Shi, Mohammad Amin Alipour
Date: 2024-07-06 00:00:00

Unit testing is crucial in software engineering for ensuring quality. However, it's not widely used in parallel and high-performance computing software, particularly scientific applications, due to their smaller, diverse user base and complex logic. These factors make unit testing challenging and expensive, as it requires specialized knowledge and existing automated tools are often ineffective. To address this, we propose an automated method for generating unit tests for such software, considering their unique features like complex logic and parallel processing. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in coding and testing. We explored the capabilities of Davinci (text-davinci-002) and ChatGPT (gpt-3.5-turbo) in creating unit tests for C++ parallel programs. Our results show that LLMs can generate mostly correct and comprehensive unit tests, although they have some limitations, such as repetitive assertions and blank test cases.
A Generalized Transformer-based Radio Link Failure Prediction Framework in 5G RANs
Authors: Kazi Hasan, Thomas Trappenberg, Israat Haque
Date: 2024-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Prediction, Time Series

Radio link failure (RLF) prediction system in Radio Access Networks (RANs) is critical for ensuring seamless communication and meeting the stringent requirements of high data rates, low latency, and improved reliability in 5G networks. However, weather conditions such as precipitation, humidity, temperature, and wind impact these communication links. Usually, historical radio link Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) and their surrounding weather station observations are utilized for building learning-based RLF prediction models. However, such models must be capable of learning the spatial weather context in a dynamic RAN and effectively encoding time series KPIs with the weather observation data. Existing works fail to incorporate both of these essential design aspects of the prediction models. This paper fills the gap by proposing GenTrap, a novel RLF prediction framework that introduces a graph neural network (GNN)-based learnable weather effect aggregation module and employs state-of-the-art time series transformer as the temporal feature extractor for radio link failure prediction. The proposed aggregation method of GenTrap can be integrated into any existing prediction model to achieve better performance and generalizability. We evaluate GenTrap on two real-world datasets (rural and urban) with 2.6 million KPI data points and show that GenTrap offers a significantly higher F1-score (0.93 for rural and 0.79 for urban) compared to its counterparts while possessing generalization capability.
CBM: Curriculum by Masking
Authors: Andrei Jarca, Florinel-Alin Croitoru, Radu Tudor Ionescu
Date: 2024-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Recognition, Transfer Learning

We propose Curriculum by Masking (CBM), a novel state-of-the-art curriculum learning strategy that effectively creates an easy-to-hard training schedule via patch (token) masking, offering significant accuracy improvements over the conventional training regime and previous curriculum learning (CL) methods. CBM leverages gradient magnitudes to prioritize the masking of salient image regions via a novel masking algorithm and a novel masking block. Our approach enables controlling sample difficulty via the patch masking ratio, generating an effective easy-to-hard curriculum by gradually introducing harder samples as training progresses. CBM operates with two easily configurable parameters, i.e. the number of patches and the curriculum schedule, making it a versatile curriculum learning approach for object recognition and detection. We conduct experiments with various neural architectures, ranging from convolutional networks to vision transformers, on five benchmark data sets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, ImageNet, Food-101 and PASCAL VOC), to compare CBM with conventional as well as curriculum-based training regimes. Our results reveal the superiority of our strategy compared with the state-of-the-art curriculum learning regimes. We also observe improvements in transfer learning contexts, where CBM surpasses previous work by considerable margins in terms of accuracy. We release our code for free non-commercial use at https://github.com/CroitoruAlin/CBM.
FlowLearn: Evaluating Large Vision-Language Models on Flowchart Understanding
Authors: Huitong Pan, Qi Zhang, Cornelia Caragea, Eduard Dragut, Longin Jan Latecki
Date: 2024-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Flowcharts are graphical tools for representing complex concepts in concise visual representations. This paper introduces the FlowLearn dataset, a resource tailored to enhance the understanding of flowcharts. FlowLearn contains complex scientific flowcharts and simulated flowcharts. The scientific subset contains 3,858 flowcharts sourced from scientific literature and the simulated subset contains 10,000 flowcharts created using a customizable script. The dataset is enriched with annotations for visual components, OCR, Mermaid code representation, and VQA question-answer pairs. Despite the proven capabilities of Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) in various visual understanding tasks, their effectiveness in decoding flowcharts - a crucial element of scientific communication - has yet to be thoroughly investigated. The FlowLearn test set is crafted to assess the performance of LVLMs in flowchart comprehension. Our study thoroughly evaluates state-of-the-art LVLMs, identifying existing limitations and establishing a foundation for future enhancements in this relatively underexplored domain. For instance, in tasks involving simulated flowcharts, GPT-4V achieved the highest accuracy (58%) in counting the number of nodes, while Claude recorded the highest accuracy (83%) in OCR tasks. Notably, no single model excels in all tasks within the FlowLearn framework, highlighting significant opportunities for further development.
Synthetic Data Aided Federated Learning Using Foundation Models
Authors: Fatima Abacha, Sin G. Teo, Lucas C. Cordeiro, Mustafa A. Mustafa
Date: 2024-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Federated Learning

In heterogeneous scenarios where the data distribution amongst the Federated Learning (FL) participants is Non-Independent and Identically distributed (Non-IID), FL suffers from the well known problem of data heterogeneity. This leads the performance of FL to be significantly degraded, as the global model tends to struggle to converge. To solve this problem, we propose Differentially Private Synthetic Data Aided Federated Learning Using Foundation Models (DPSDA-FL), a novel data augmentation strategy that aids in homogenizing the local data present on the clients' side. DPSDA-FL improves the training of the local models by leveraging differentially private synthetic data generated from foundation models. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach by evaluating it on the benchmark image dataset: CIFAR-10. Our experimental results have shown that DPSDA-FL can improve class recall and classification accuracy of the global model by up to 26% and 9%, respectively, in FL with Non-IID issues.
Identifying Intensity of the Structure and Content in Tweets and the Discriminative Power of Attributes in Context with Referential Translation Machines
Authors: Ergun Biçici
Date: 2024-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Machine Translation, Translation

We use referential translation machines (RTMs) to identify the similarity between an attribute and two words in English by casting the task as machine translation performance prediction (MTPP) between the words and the attribute word and the distance between their similarities for Task 10 with stacked RTM models. RTMs are also used to predict the intensity of the structure and content in tweets in English, Arabic, and Spanish in Task 1 where MTPP is between the tweets and the set of words for the emotion selected from WordNet affect emotion lists. Stacked RTM models obtain encouraging results in both.
Lucy: Think and Reason to Solve Text-to-SQL
Authors: Nina Narodytska, Shay Vargaftik
Date: 2024-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Text to SQL, Text-To-SQL

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in assisting users to query databases in natural language. While LLM-based techniques provide state-of-the-art results on many standard benchmarks, their performance significantly drops when applied to large enterprise databases. The reason is that these databases have a large number of tables with complex relationships that are challenging for LLMs to reason about. We analyze challenges that LLMs face in these settings and propose a new solution that combines the power of LLMs in understanding questions with automated reasoning techniques to handle complex database constraints. Based on these ideas, we have developed a new framework that outperforms state-of-the-art techniques in zero-shot text-to-SQL on complex benchmarks
Are LLMs Correctly Integrated into Software Systems?
Authors: Yuchen Shao, Yuheng Huang, Jiawei Shen, Lei Ma, Ting Su, Chengcheng Wan
Date: 2024-07-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) provide effective solutions in various application scenarios, with the support of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). However, developers face challenges in integrating LLM and RAG into software systems, due to lacking interface specifications, various requirements from software context, and complicated system management. In this paper, we have conducted a comprehensive study of 100 open-source applications that incorporate LLMs with RAG support, and identified 18 defect patterns. Our study reveals that 77% of these applications contain more than three types of integration defects that degrade software functionality, efficiency, and security. Guided by our study, we propose systematic guidelines for resolving these defects in software life cycle. We also construct an open-source defect library Hydrangea.