pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Controllable Talking Face Generation by Implicit Facial Keypoints Editing
Authors: Dong Zhao, Jiaying Shi, Wenjun Li, Shudong Wang, Shenghui Xu, Zhaoming Pan
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Generation, Talking Face Generation

Audio-driven talking face generation has garnered significant interest within the domain of digital human research. Existing methods are encumbered by intricate model architectures that are intricately dependent on each other, complicating the process of re-editing image or video inputs. In this work, we present ControlTalk, a talking face generation method to control face expression deformation based on driven audio, which can construct the head pose and facial expression including lip motion for both single image or sequential video inputs in a unified manner. By utilizing a pre-trained video synthesis renderer and proposing the lightweight adaptation, ControlTalk achieves precise and naturalistic lip synchronization while enabling quantitative control over mouth opening shape. Our experiments show that our method is superior to state-of-the-art performance on widely used benchmarks, including HDTF and MEAD. The parameterized adaptation demonstrates remarkable generalization capabilities, effectively handling expression deformation across same-ID and cross-ID scenarios, and extending its utility to out-of-domain portraits, regardless of languages. Code is available at https://github.com/NetEase-Media/ControlTalk.
LCS: A Language Converter Strategy for Zero-Shot Neural Machine Translation
Authors: Zengkui Sun, Yijin Liu, Fandong Meng, Jinan Xu, Yufeng Chen, Jie zhou
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Machine Translation, TAG, Translation

Multilingual neural machine translation models generally distinguish translation directions by the language tag (LT) in front of the source or target sentences. However, current LT strategies cannot indicate the desired target language as expected on zero-shot translation, i.e., the off-target issue. Our analysis reveals that the indication of the target language is sensitive to the placement of the target LT. For example, when placing the target LT on the decoder side, the indication would rapidly degrade along with decoding steps, while placing the target LT on the encoder side would lead to copying or paraphrasing the source input. To address the above issues, we propose a simple yet effective strategy named Language Converter Strategy (LCS). By introducing the target language embedding into the top encoder layers, LCS mitigates confusion in the encoder and ensures stable language indication for the decoder. Experimental results on MultiUN, TED, and OPUS-100 datasets demonstrate that LCS could significantly mitigate the off-target issue, with language accuracy up to 95.28%, 96.21%, and 85.35% meanwhile outperforming the vanilla LT strategy by 3.07, 3,3, and 7.93 BLEU scores on zero-shot translation, respectively.
Combinatorial Optimization with Automated Graph Neural Networks
Authors: Yang Liu, Peng Zhang, Yang Gao, Chuan Zhou, Zhao Li, Hongyang Chen
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Graph Embedding, Graph Learning, Neural Architecture Search

In recent years, graph neural networks (GNNs) have become increasingly popular for solving NP-hard combinatorial optimization (CO) problems, such as maximum cut and maximum independent set. The core idea behind these methods is to represent a CO problem as a graph and then use GNNs to learn the node/graph embedding with combinatorial information. Although these methods have achieved promising results, given a specific CO problem, the design of GNN architectures still requires heavy manual work with domain knowledge. Existing automated GNNs are mostly focused on traditional graph learning problems, which is inapplicable to solving NP-hard CO problems. To this end, we present a new class of \textbf{AUTO}mated \textbf{G}NNs for solving \textbf{NP}-hard problems, namely \textbf{AutoGNP}. We represent CO problems by GNNs and focus on two specific problems, i.e., mixed integer linear programming and quadratic unconstrained binary optimization. The idea of AutoGNP is to use graph neural architecture search algorithms to automatically find the best GNNs for a given NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem. Compared with existing graph neural architecture search algorithms, AutoGNP utilizes two-hop operators in the architecture search space. Moreover, AutoGNP utilizes simulated annealing and a strict early stopping policy to avoid local optimal solutions. Empirical results on benchmark combinatorial problems demonstrate the superiority of our proposed model.
Sound Heuristic Search Value Iteration for Undiscounted POMDPs with Reachability Objectives
Authors: Qi Heng Ho, Martin S. Feather, Federico Rossi, Zachary N. Sunberg, Morteza Lahijanian
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Efficient Exploration, Heuristic Search, Sequential Decision Making

Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) are powerful models for sequential decision making under transition and observation uncertainties. This paper studies the challenging yet important problem in POMDPs known as the (indefinite-horizon) Maximal Reachability Probability Problem (MRPP), where the goal is to maximize the probability of reaching some target states. This is also a core problem in model checking with logical specifications and is naturally undiscounted (discount factor is one). Inspired by the success of point-based methods developed for discounted problems, we study their extensions to MRPP. Specifically, we focus on trial-based heuristic search value iteration techniques and present a novel algorithm that leverages the strengths of these techniques for efficient exploration of the belief space (informed search via value bounds) while addressing their drawbacks in handling loops for indefinite-horizon problems. The algorithm produces policies with two-sided bounds on optimal reachability probabilities. We prove convergence to an optimal policy from below under certain conditions. Experimental evaluations on a suite of benchmarks show that our algorithm outperforms existing methods in almost all cases in both probability guarantees and computation time.
Oscillations enhance time-series prediction in reservoir computing with feedback
Authors: Yuji Kawai, Takashi Morita, Jihoon Park, Minoru Asada
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Prediction

Reservoir computing, a machine learning framework used for modeling the brain, can predict temporal data with little observations and minimal computational resources. However, it is difficult to accurately reproduce the long-term target time series because the reservoir system becomes unstable. This predictive capability is required for a wide variety of time-series processing, including predictions of motor timing and chaotic dynamical systems. This study proposes oscillation-driven reservoir computing (ODRC) with feedback, where oscillatory signals are fed into a reservoir network to stabilize the network activity and induce complex reservoir dynamics. The ODRC can reproduce long-term target time series more accurately than conventional reservoir computing methods in a motor timing and chaotic time-series prediction tasks. Furthermore, it generates a time series similar to the target in the unexperienced period, that is, it can learn the abstract generative rules from limited observations. Given these significant improvements made by the simple and computationally inexpensive implementation, the ODRC would serve as a practical model of various time series data. Moreover, we will discuss biological implications of the ODRC, considering it as a model of neural oscillations and their cerebellar processors.
NUMCoT: Numerals and Units of Measurement in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning using Large Language Models
Authors: Ancheng Xu, Minghuan Tan, Lei Wang, Min Yang, Ruifeng Xu
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Mathematical Reasoning

Numeral systems and units of measurement are two conjoined topics in activities of human beings and have mutual effects with the languages expressing them. Currently, the evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs) often involves mathematical reasoning, yet little attention is given to how minor changes in numbers or units can drastically alter the complexity of problems and the performance of LLMs. In this paper, we scrutinize existing LLMs on processing of numerals and units of measurement by constructing datasets with perturbations. We first anatomize the reasoning of math word problems to different sub-procedures like numeral conversions from language to numbers and measurement conversions based on units. Then we further annotate math word problems from ancient Chinese arithmetic works which are challenging in numerals and units of measurement. Experiments on perturbed datasets demonstrate that LLMs still encounter difficulties in handling numeral and measurement conversions.
Xmodel-LM Technical Report
Authors: Yichuan Wang, Yang Liu, Yu Yan, Qun Wang, Xucheng Huang, Ling Jiang
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We introduce Xmodel-LM, a compact and efficient 1.1B language model pre-trained on around 2 trillion tokens. Trained on our self-built dataset (Xdata), which balances Chinese and English corpora based on downstream task optimization, Xmodel-LM exhibits remarkable performance despite its smaller size. It notably surpasses existing open-source language models of similar scale. Our model checkpoints and code are publicly accessible on GitHub at https://github.com/XiaoduoAILab/XmodelLM.
Conditional Idempotent Generative Networks
Authors: Niccolò Ronchetti
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00

We propose Conditional Idempotent Generative Networks (CIGN), a novel approach that expands upon Idempotent Generative Networks (IGN) to enable conditional generation. While IGNs offer efficient single-pass generation, they lack the ability to control the content of the generated data. CIGNs address this limitation by incorporating conditioning mechanisms, allowing users to steer the generation process towards specific types of data. We establish the theoretical foundations for CIGNs, outlining their scope, loss function design, and evaluation metrics. We then present two potential architectures for implementing CIGNs: channel conditioning and filter conditioning. Finally, we discuss experimental results on the MNIST dataset, demonstrating the effectiveness of both approaches. Our findings pave the way for further exploration of CIGNs on larger datasets and with more powerful computing resources to determine the optimal implementation strategy.
Stochastic Diffusion: A Diffusion Probabilistic Model for Stochastic Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Yuansan Liu, Sudanthi Wijewickrema, Dongting Hu, Christofer Bester, Stephen O'Leary, James Bailey
Date: 2024-06-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Generation, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Recent innovations in diffusion probabilistic models have paved the way for significant progress in image, text and audio generation, leading to their applications in generative time series forecasting. However, leveraging such abilities to model highly stochastic time series data remains a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel Stochastic Diffusion (StochDiff) model which learns data-driven prior knowledge at each time step by utilizing the representational power of the stochastic latent spaces to model the variability of the multivariate time series data. The learnt prior knowledge helps the model to capture complex temporal dynamics and the inherent uncertainty of the data. This improves its ability to model highly stochastic time series data. Through extensive experiments on real-world datasets, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed model on stochastic time series forecasting. Additionally, we showcase an application of our model for real-world surgical guidance, highlighting its potential to benefit the medical community.
$\texttt{ACCORD}$: Closing the Commonsense Measurability Gap
Authors: François Roewer-Després, Jinyue Feng, Zining Zhu, Frank Rudzicz
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Common Sense Reasoning, Counterfactual Reasoning, Large Language Model, Question Answering

We present $\texttt{ACCORD}$, a framework and benchmark suite for disentangling the commonsense grounding and reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) through controlled, multi-hop counterfactuals. $\texttt{ACCORD}$ introduces formal elements to commonsense reasoning to explicitly control and quantify reasoning complexity beyond the typical 1 or 2 hops. Uniquely, $\texttt{ACCORD}$ can automatically generate benchmarks of arbitrary reasoning complexity, and so it scales with future LLM improvements. Benchmarking state-of-the-art LLMs -- including GPT-4o (2024-05-13), Llama-3-70B-Instruct, and Mixtral-8x22B-Instruct-v0.1 -- shows performance degrading to random chance with only moderate scaling, leaving substantial headroom for improvement. We release a leaderboard of the benchmark suite tested in this work, as well as code for automatically generating more complex benchmarks.
Language Models can Infer Action Semantics for Symbolic Planners from Environment Feedback
Authors: Wang Zhu, Ishika Singh, Robin Jia, Jesse Thomason
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00

Symbolic planners can discover a sequence of actions from initial to goal states given expert-defined, domain-specific logical action semantics. Large Language Models (LLMs) can directly generate such sequences, but limitations in reasoning and state-tracking often result in plans that are insufficient or unexecutable. We propose Predicting Semantics of Actions with Language Models (PSALM), which automatically learns action semantics by leveraging the strengths of both symbolic planners and LLMs. PSALM repeatedly proposes and executes plans, using the LLM to partially generate plans and to infer domain-specific action semantics based on execution outcomes. PSALM maintains a belief over possible action semantics that is iteratively updated until a goal state is reached. Experiments on 7 environments show that when learning just from one goal, PSALM boosts plan success rate from 36.4% (on Claude-3.5) to 100%, and explores the environment more efficiently than prior work to infer ground truth domain action semantics.
Disentangling Logic: The Role of Context in Large Language Model Reasoning Capabilities
Authors: Wenyue Hua, Kaijie Zhu, Lingyao Li, Lizhou Fan, Shuhang Lin, Mingyu Jin, Haochen Xue, Zelong Li, Jindong Wang, Yongfeng Zhang
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Logical Reasoning

This study intends to systematically disentangle pure logic reasoning and text understanding by investigating the contrast across abstract and contextualized logical problems from a comprehensive set of domains. We explore whether LLMs demonstrate genuine reasoning capabilities across various domains when the underlying logical structure remains constant. We focus on two main questions (1) Can abstract logical problems alone accurately benchmark an LLM's reasoning ability in real-world scenarios, disentangled from contextual support in practical settings? (2) Does fine-tuning LLMs on abstract logic problem generalize to contextualized logic problems and vice versa? To investigate these questions, we focus on standard propositional logic, specifically propositional deductive and abductive logic reasoning. In particular, we construct instantiated datasets for deductive and abductive reasoning with 4 levels of difficulty, encompassing 12 distinct categories or domains based on the categorization of Wikipedia. Our experiments aim to provide insights into disentangling context in logical reasoning and the true reasoning capabilities of LLMs and their generalization potential. The code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/agiresearch/ContextHub.
LADI v2: Multi-label Dataset and Classifiers for Low-Altitude Disaster Imagery
Authors: Samuel Scheele, Katherine Picchione, Jeffrey Liu
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Multi-Label Classification, MUlTI-LABEL-ClASSIFICATION, Multi-Label Image Classification

ML-based computer vision models are promising tools for supporting emergency management operations following natural disasters. Arial photographs taken from small manned and unmanned aircraft can be available soon after a disaster and provide valuable information from multiple perspectives for situational awareness and damage assessment applications. However, emergency managers often face challenges finding the most relevant photos among the tens of thousands that may be taken after an incident. While ML-based solutions could enable more effective use of aerial photographs, there is still a lack of training data for imagery of this type from multiple perspectives and for multiple hazard types. To address this, we present the LADI v2 (Low Altitude Disaster Imagery version 2) dataset, a curated set of about 10,000 disaster images captured in the United States by the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) in response to federally-declared emergencies (2015-2023) and annotated for multi-label classification by trained CAP volunteers. We also provide two pretrained baseline classifiers and compare their performance to state-of-the-art vision-language models in multi-label classification. The data and code are released publicly to support the development of computer vision models for emergency management research and applications.
Diagnostic Digital Twin for Anomaly Detection in Floating Offshore Wind Energy
Authors: Florian Stadtmann, Adil Rasheed
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Diagnostic, Fault Diagnosis

The demand for condition-based and predictive maintenance is rising across industries, especially for remote, high-value, and high-risk assets. In this article, the diagnostic digital twin concept is introduced, discussed, and implemented for a floating offshore turbine. A diagnostic digital twin is a virtual representation of an asset that combines real-time data and models to monitor damage, detect anomalies, and diagnose failures, thereby enabling condition-based and predictive maintenance. By applying diagnostic digital twins to offshore assets, unexpected failures can be alleviated, but the implementation can prove challenging. Here, a diagnostic digital twin is implemented for an operational floating offshore wind turbine. The asset is monitored through measurements. Unsupervised learning methods are employed to build a normal operation model, detect anomalies, and provide a fault diagnosis. Warnings and diagnoses are sent through text messages, and a more detailed diagnosis can be accessed in a virtual reality interface. The diagnostic digital twin successfully detected an anomaly with high confidence hours before a failure occurred. The paper concludes by discussing diagnostic digital twins in the broader context of offshore engineering. The presented approach can be generalized to other offshore assets to improve maintenance and increase the lifetime, efficiency, and sustainability of offshore assets.
Adaptive Preference Scaling for Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback
Authors: Ilgee Hong, Zichong Li, Alexander Bukharin, Yixiao Li, Haoming Jiang, Tianbao Yang, Tuo Zhao
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Text Generation

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a prevalent approach to align AI systems with human values by learning rewards from human preference data. Due to various reasons, however, such data typically takes the form of rankings over pairs of trajectory segments, which fails to capture the varying strengths of preferences across different pairs. In this paper, we propose a novel adaptive preference loss, underpinned by distributionally robust optimization (DRO), designed to address this uncertainty in preference strength. By incorporating an adaptive scaling parameter into the loss for each pair, our method increases the flexibility of the reward function. Specifically, it assigns small scaling parameters to pairs with ambiguous preferences, leading to more comparable rewards, and large scaling parameters to those with clear preferences for more distinct rewards. Computationally, our proposed loss function is strictly convex and univariate with respect to each scaling parameter, enabling its efficient optimization through a simple second-order algorithm. Our method is versatile and can be readily adapted to various preference optimization frameworks, including direct preference optimization (DPO). Our experiments with robotic control and natural language generation with large language models (LLMs) show that our method not only improves policy performance but also aligns reward function selection more closely with policy optimization, simplifying the hyperparameter tuning process.
Multi-layer Learnable Attention Mask for Multimodal Tasks
Authors: Wayner Barrios, SouYoung Jin
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00

While the Self-Attention mechanism in the Transformer model has proven to be effective in many domains, we observe that it is less effective in more diverse settings (e.g. multimodality) due to the varying granularity of each token and the high computational demands of lengthy sequences. To address the challenges, we introduce the Learnable Attention Mask (LAM), strategically designed to globally regulate attention maps and prioritize critical tokens within the sequence. Leveraging the Self-Attention module in a BERT-like transformer network, our approach adeptly captures associations between tokens. The extension of the LAM to a multi-layer version accommodates the varied information aspects embedded at each layer of the Transformer network. Comprehensive experimental validation on various datasets, such as MADv2, QVHighlights, ImageNet 1K, and MSRVTT, demonstrates the efficacy of the LAM, exemplifying its ability to enhance model performance while mitigating redundant computations. This pioneering approach presents a significant advancement in enhancing the understanding of complex scenarios, such as in movie understanding.
Aligning Large Language Models via Fine-grained Supervision
Authors: Dehong Xu, Liang Qiu, Minseok Kim, Faisal Ladhak, Jaeyoung Do
Date: 2024-06-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Pre-trained large-scale language models (LLMs) excel at producing coherent articles, yet their outputs may be untruthful, toxic, or fail to align with user expectations. Current approaches focus on using reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) to improve model alignment, which works by transforming coarse human preferences of LLM outputs into a feedback signal that guides the model learning process. However, because this approach operates on sequence-level feedback, it lacks the precision to identify the exact parts of the output affecting user preferences. To address this gap, we propose a method to enhance LLM alignment through fine-grained token-level supervision. Specifically, we ask annotators to minimally edit less preferred responses within the standard reward modeling dataset to make them more favorable, ensuring changes are made only where necessary while retaining most of the original content. The refined dataset is used to train a token-level reward model, which is then used for training our fine-grained Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) model. Our experiment results demonstrate that this approach can achieve up to an absolute improvement of $5.1\%$ in LLM performance, in terms of win rate against the reference model, compared with the traditional PPO model.