pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
HACD: Harnessing Attribute Semantics and Mesoscopic Structure for Community Detection
Authors: Anran Zhang, Xingfen Wang, Yuhan Zhao
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Attribute, Community Detection, Graph Attention, Recommendation Systems, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Community detection plays a pivotal role in uncovering closely connected subgraphs, aiding various real-world applications such as recommendation systems and anomaly detection. With the surge of rich information available for entities in real-world networks, the community detection problem in attributed networks has attracted widespread attention. While previous research has effectively leveraged network topology and attribute information for attributed community detection, these methods overlook two critical issues: (i) the semantic similarity between node attributes within the community, and (ii) the inherent mesoscopic structure, which differs from the pairwise connections of the micro-structure. To address these limitations, we propose HACD, a novel attributed community detection model based on heterogeneous graph attention networks. HACD treats node attributes as another type of node, constructs attributed networks into heterogeneous graph structures and employs attribute-level attention mechanisms to capture semantic similarity. Furthermore, HACD introduces a community membership function to explore mesoscopic community structures, enhancing the robustness of detected communities. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of HACD, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in attributed community detection tasks. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/Anniran1/HACD1-wsdm.
Exploring the Landscape for Generative Sequence Models for Specialized Data Synthesis
Authors: Mohammad Zbeeb, Mohammad Ghorayeb, Mariam Salman
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Privacy Preserving

Artificial Intelligence (AI) research often aims to develop models that can generalize reliably across complex datasets, yet this remains challenging in fields where data is scarce, intricate, or inaccessible. This paper introduces a novel approach that leverages three generative models of varying complexity to synthesize one of the most demanding structured datasets: Malicious Network Traffic. Our approach uniquely transforms numerical data into text, re-framing data generation as a language modeling task, which not only enhances data regularization but also significantly improves generalization and the quality of the synthetic data. Extensive statistical analyses demonstrate that our method surpasses state-of-the-art generative models in producing high-fidelity synthetic data. Additionally, we conduct a comprehensive study on synthetic data applications, effectiveness, and evaluation strategies, offering valuable insights into its role across various domains. Our code and pre-trained models are openly accessible at Github, enabling further exploration and application of our methodology. Index Terms: Data synthesis, machine learning, traffic generation, privacy preserving data, generative models.
Fairness-Utilization Trade-off in Wireless Networks with Explainable Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks
Authors: Masoud Shokrnezhad, Hamidreza Mazandarani, Tarik Taleb
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Dataset Generation, Fairness, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks

The effective distribution of user transmit powers is essential for the significant advancements that the emergence of 6G wireless networks brings. In recent studies, Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) have been employed to address this challenge. However, these methods frequently encounter issues regarding fairness and computational inefficiency when making decisions, rendering them unsuitable for future dynamic services that depend heavily on the participation of each individual user. To address this gap, this paper focuses on the challenge of transmit power allocation in wireless networks, aiming to optimize $\alpha$-fairness to balance network utilization and user equity. We introduce a novel approach utilizing Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KANs), a class of machine learning models that offer low inference costs compared to traditional DNNs through superior explainability. The study provides a comprehensive problem formulation, establishing the NP-hardness of the power allocation problem. Then, two algorithms are proposed for dataset generation and decentralized KAN training, offering a flexible framework for achieving various fairness objectives in dynamic 6G environments. Extensive numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in terms of fairness and inference cost. The results underscore the potential of KANs to overcome the limitations of existing DNN-based methods, particularly in scenarios that demand rapid adaptation and fairness.
Best-Arm Identification in Unimodal Bandits
Authors: Riccardo Poiani, Marc Jourdan, Emilie Kaufmann, Rémy Degenne
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

We study the fixed-confidence best-arm identification problem in unimodal bandits, in which the means of the arms increase with the index of the arm up to their maximum, then decrease. We derive two lower bounds on the stopping time of any algorithm. The instance-dependent lower bound suggests that due to the unimodal structure, only three arms contribute to the leading confidence-dependent cost. However, a worst-case lower bound shows that a linear dependence on the number of arms is unavoidable in the confidence-independent cost. We propose modifications of Track-and-Stop and a Top Two algorithm that leverage the unimodal structure. Both versions of Track-and-Stop are asymptotically optimal for one-parameter exponential families. The Top Two algorithm is asymptotically near-optimal for Gaussian distributions and we prove a non-asymptotic guarantee matching the worse-case lower bound. The algorithms can be implemented efficiently and we demonstrate their competitive empirical performance.
LE-PDE++: Mamba for accelerating PDEs Simulations
Authors: Aoming Liang, Zhaoyang Mu, Qi Liu, Ruipeng Li, Mingming Ge, Dixia Fan
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Mamba, Weather Forecasting

Partial Differential Equations are foundational in modeling science and natural systems such as fluid dynamics and weather forecasting. The Latent Evolution of PDEs method is designed to address the computational intensity of classical and deep learning-based PDE solvers by proposing a scalable and efficient alternative. To enhance the efficiency and accuracy of LE-PDE, we incorporate the Mamba model, an advanced machine learning model known for its predictive efficiency and robustness in handling complex dynamic systems with a progressive learning strategy. The LE-PDE was tested on several benchmark problems. The method demonstrated a marked reduction in computational time compared to traditional solvers and standalone deep learning models while maintaining high accuracy in predicting system behavior over time. Our method doubles the inference speed compared to the LE-PDE while retaining the same level of parameter efficiency, making it well-suited for scenarios requiring long-term predictions.
MBDRes-U-Net: Multi-Scale Lightweight Brain Tumor Segmentation Network
Authors: Longfeng Shen, Yanqi Hou, Jiacong Chen, Liangjin Diao, Yaxi Duan
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Brain Tumor Segmentation, Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

Accurate segmentation of brain tumors plays a key role in the diagnosis and treatment of brain tumor diseases. It serves as a critical technology for quantifying tumors and extracting their features. With the increasing application of deep learning methods, the computational burden has become progressively heavier. To achieve a lightweight model with good segmentation performance, this study proposes the MBDRes-U-Net model using the three-dimensional (3D) U-Net codec framework, which integrates multibranch residual blocks and fused attention into the model. The computational burden of the model is reduced by the branch strategy, which effectively uses the rich local features in multimodal images and enhances the segmentation performance of subtumor regions. Additionally, during encoding, an adaptive weighted expansion convolution layer is introduced into the multi-branch residual block, which enriches the feature expression and improves the segmentation accuracy of the model. Experiments on the Brain Tumor Segmentation (BraTS) Challenge 2018 and 2019 datasets show that the architecture could maintain a high precision of brain tumor segmentation while considerably reducing the calculation overhead.Our code is released at https://github.com/Huaibei-normal-university-cv-laboratory/mbdresunet
LiDAttack: Robust Black-box Attack on LiDAR-based Object Detection
Authors: Jinyin Chen, Danxin Liao, Sheng Xiang, Haibin Zheng
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, object-detection, Object Detection

Since DNN is vulnerable to carefully crafted adversarial examples, adversarial attack on LiDAR sensors have been extensively studied. We introduce a robust black-box attack dubbed LiDAttack. It utilizes a genetic algorithm with a simulated annealing strategy to strictly limit the location and number of perturbation points, achieving a stealthy and effective attack. And it simulates scanning deviations, allowing it to adapt to dynamic changes in real world scenario variations. Extensive experiments are conducted on 3 datasets (i.e., KITTI, nuScenes, and self-constructed data) with 3 dominant object detection models (i.e., PointRCNN, PointPillar, and PV-RCNN++). The results reveal the efficiency of the LiDAttack when targeting a wide range of object detection models, with an attack success rate (ASR) up to 90%.
Mining and Transferring Feature-Geometry Coherence for Unsupervised Point Cloud Registration
Authors: Kezheng Xiong, Haoen Xiang, Qingshan Xu, Chenglu Wen, Siqi Shen, Jonathan Li, Cheng Wang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Point Cloud Registration, Pseudo Label

Point cloud registration, a fundamental task in 3D vision, has achieved remarkable success with learning-based methods in outdoor environments. Unsupervised outdoor point cloud registration methods have recently emerged to circumvent the need for costly pose annotations. However, they fail to establish reliable optimization objectives for unsupervised training, either relying on overly strong geometric assumptions, or suffering from poor-quality pseudo-labels due to inadequate integration of low-level geometric and high-level contextual information. We have observed that in the feature space, latent new inlier correspondences tend to cluster around respective positive anchors that summarize features of existing inliers. Motivated by this observation, we propose a novel unsupervised registration method termed INTEGER to incorporate high-level contextual information for reliable pseudo-label mining. Specifically, we propose the Feature-Geometry Coherence Mining module to dynamically adapt the teacher for each mini-batch of data during training and discover reliable pseudo-labels by considering both high-level feature representations and low-level geometric cues. Furthermore, we propose Anchor-Based Contrastive Learning to facilitate contrastive learning with anchors for a robust feature space. Lastly, we introduce a Mixed-Density Student to learn density-invariant features, addressing challenges related to density variation and low overlap in the outdoor scenario. Extensive experiments on KITTI and nuScenes datasets demonstrate that our INTEGER achieves competitive performance in terms of accuracy and generalizability.
Improving Trust Estimation in Human-Robot Collaboration Using Beta Reputation at Fine-grained Timescales
Authors: Resul Dagdanov, Milan Andrejevic, Dikai Liu, Chin-Teng Lin
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference, Behavioural cloning, Human-Object Relationship Detection, Robot Manipulation

When interacting with each other, humans adjust their behavior based on perceived trust. However, to achieve similar adaptability, robots must accurately estimate human trust at sufficiently granular timescales during the human-robot collaboration task. A beta reputation is a popular way to formalize a mathematical estimation of human trust. However, it relies on binary performance, which updates trust estimations only after each task concludes. Additionally, manually crafting a reward function is the usual method of building a performance indicator, which is labor-intensive and time-consuming. These limitations prevent efficiently capturing continuous changes in trust at more granular timescales throughout the collaboration task. Therefore, this paper presents a new framework for the estimation of human trust using a beta reputation at fine-grained timescales. To achieve granularity in beta reputation, we utilize continuous reward values to update trust estimations at each timestep of a task. We construct a continuous reward function using maximum entropy optimization to eliminate the need for the laborious specification of a performance indicator. The proposed framework improves trust estimations by increasing accuracy, eliminating the need for manually crafting a reward function, and advancing toward developing more intelligent robots. The source code is publicly available. https://github.com/resuldagdanov/robot-learning-human-trust
Silver medal Solution for Image Matching Challenge 2024
Authors: Yian Wang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Keypoint Detection

Image Matching Challenge 2024 is a competition focused on building 3D maps from diverse image sets, requiring participants to solve fundamental computer vision challenges in image matching across varying angles, lighting, and seasonal changes. This project develops a Pipeline method that combines multiple advanced techniques: using pre-trained EfficientNet-B7 for initial feature extraction and cosine distance-based image pair filtering, employing both KeyNetAffNetHardNet and SuperPoint for keypoint feature extraction, utilizing AdaLAM and SuperGlue for keypoint matching, and finally applying Pycolmap for 3D spatial analysis. The methodology achieved an excellent score of 0.167 on the private leaderboard, with experimental results demonstrating that the combination of KeyNetAffNetHardNet and SuperPoint provides significant advantages in keypoint detection and matching, particularly when dealing with challenging variations in surface texture and environmental conditions that typically degrade traditional algorithm performance.
DREsS: Dataset for Rubric-based Essay Scoring on EFL Writing
Authors: Haneul Yoo, Jieun Han, So-Yeon Ahn, Alice Oh
Date: 2024-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Automated Essay Scoring

Automated essay scoring (AES) is a useful tool in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) writing education, offering real-time essay scores for students and instructors. However, previous AES models were trained on essays and scores irrelevant to the practical scenarios of EFL writing education and usually provided a single holistic score due to the lack of appropriate datasets. In this paper, we release DREsS, a large-scale, standard dataset for rubric-based automated essay scoring. DREsS comprises three sub-datasets: DREsS_New, DREsS_Std., and DREsS_CASE. We collect DREsS_New, a real-classroom dataset with 2.3K essays authored by EFL undergraduate students and scored by English education experts. We also standardize existing rubric-based essay scoring datasets as DREsS_Std. We suggest CASE, a corruption-based augmentation strategy for essays, which generates 40.1K synthetic samples of DREsS_CASE and improves the baseline results by 45.44%. DREsS will enable further research to provide a more accurate and practical AES system for EFL writing education.
DeMod: A Holistic Tool with Explainable Detection and Personalized Modification for Toxicity Censorship
Authors: Yaqiong Li, Peng Zhang, Hansu Gu, Tun Lu, Siyuan Qiao, Yubo Shu, YiYang Shao, Ning Gu
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

Although there have been automated approaches and tools supporting toxicity censorship for social posts, most of them focus on detection. Toxicity censorship is a complex process, wherein detection is just an initial task and a user can have further needs such as rationale understanding and content modification. For this problem, we conduct a needfinding study to investigate people's diverse needs in toxicity censorship and then build a ChatGPT-based censorship tool named DeMod accordingly. DeMod is equipped with the features of explainable Detection and personalized Modification, providing fine-grained detection results, detailed explanations, and personalized modification suggestions. We also implemented the tool and recruited 35 Weibo users for evaluation. The results suggest DeMod's multiple strengths like the richness of functionality, the accuracy of censorship, and ease of use. Based on the findings, we further propose several insights into the design of content censorship systems.
Free-Mask: A Novel Paradigm of Integration Between the Segmentation Diffusion Model and Image Editing to Improve Segmentation Ability
Authors: Bo Gao, Fangxu Xing, Daniel Tang
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Current semantic segmentation models typically require a substantial amount of manually annotated data, a process that is both time-consuming and resource-intensive. Alternatively, leveraging advanced text-to-image models such as Midjourney and Stable Diffusion has emerged as an efficient strategy, enabling the automatic generation of synthetic data in place of manual annotations. However, previous methods have been limited to generating single-instance images, as the generation of multiple instances with Stable Diffusion has proven unstable. To address this limitation and expand the scope and diversity of synthetic datasets, we propose a framework \textbf{Free-Mask} that combines a Diffusion Model for segmentation with advanced image editing capabilities, allowing for the integration of multiple objects into images via text-to-image models. Our method facilitates the creation of highly realistic datasets that closely emulate open-world environments while generating accurate segmentation masks. It reduces the labor associated with manual annotation and also ensures precise mask generation. Experimental results demonstrate that synthetic data generated by \textbf{Free-Mask} enables segmentation models to outperform those trained on real data, especially in zero-shot settings. Notably, \textbf{Free-Mask} achieves new state-of-the-art results on previously unseen classes in the VOC 2012 benchmark.
So You Think You Can Scale Up Autonomous Robot Data Collection?
Authors: Suvir Mirchandani, Suneel Belkhale, Joey Hejna, Evelyn Choi, Md Sazzad Islam, Dorsa Sadigh
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A long-standing goal in robot learning is to develop methods for robots to acquire new skills autonomously. While reinforcement learning (RL) comes with the promise of enabling autonomous data collection, it remains challenging to scale in the real-world partly due to the significant effort required for environment design and instrumentation, including the need for designing reset functions or accurate success detectors. On the other hand, imitation learning (IL) methods require little to no environment design effort, but instead require significant human supervision in the form of collected demonstrations. To address these shortcomings, recent works in autonomous IL start with an initial seed dataset of human demonstrations that an autonomous policy can bootstrap from. While autonomous IL approaches come with the promise of addressing the challenges of autonomous RL as well as pure IL strategies, in this work, we posit that such techniques do not deliver on this promise and are still unable to scale up autonomous data collection in the real world. Through a series of real-world experiments, we demonstrate that these approaches, when scaled up to realistic settings, face much of the same scaling challenges as prior attempts in RL in terms of environment design. Further, we perform a rigorous study of autonomous IL methods across different data scales and 7 simulation and real-world tasks, and demonstrate that while autonomous data collection can modestly improve performance, simply collecting more human data often provides significantly more improvement. Our work suggests a negative result: that scaling up autonomous data collection for learning robot policies for real-world tasks is more challenging and impractical than what is suggested in prior work. We hope these insights about the core challenges of scaling up data collection help inform future efforts in autonomous learning.
Can Language Models Enable In-Context Database?
Authors: Yu Pan, Hongfeng Yu, Tianjiao Zhao, Jianxin Sun
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Large language models (LLMs) are emerging as few-shot learners capable of handling a variety of tasks, including comprehension, planning, reasoning, question answering, arithmetic calculations, and more. At the core of these capabilities is LLMs' proficiency in representing and understanding structural or semi-structural data, such as tables and graphs. Numerous studies have demonstrated that reasoning on tabular data or graphs is not only feasible for LLMs but also gives a promising research direction which treats these data as in-context data. The lightweight and human readable characteristics of in-context database can potentially make it an alternative for the traditional database in typical RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) settings. However, almost all current work focuses on static in-context data, which does not allow dynamic update. In this paper, to enable dynamic database update, delta encoding of database is proposed. We explore how data stored in traditional RDBMS can be encoded as in-context text and evaluate LLMs' proficiency for CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations on in-context databases. A benchmark named InConDB is presented and extensive experiments are conducted to show the performance of different language models in enabling in-context database by varying the database encoding method, prompting method, operation type and input data distribution, revealing both the proficiency and limitations.
Constrained Human-AI Cooperation: An Inclusive Embodied Social Intelligence Challenge
Authors: Weihua Du, Qiushi Lyu, Jiaming Shan, Zhenting Qi, Hongxin Zhang, Sunli Chen, Andi Peng, Tianmin Shu, Kwonjoon Lee, Behzad Dariush, Chuang Gan
Date: 2024-11-04 00:00:00

We introduce Constrained Human-AI Cooperation (CHAIC), an inclusive embodied social intelligence challenge designed to test social perception and cooperation in embodied agents. In CHAIC, the goal is for an embodied agent equipped with egocentric observations to assist a human who may be operating under physical constraints -- e.g., unable to reach high places or confined to a wheelchair -- in performing common household or outdoor tasks as efficiently as possible. To achieve this, a successful helper must: (1) infer the human's intents and constraints by following the human and observing their behaviors (social perception), and (2) make a cooperative plan tailored to the human partner to solve the task as quickly as possible, working together as a team (cooperative planning). To benchmark this challenge, we create four new agents with real physical constraints and eight long-horizon tasks featuring both indoor and outdoor scenes with various constraints, emergency events, and potential risks. We benchmark planning- and learning-based baselines on the challenge and introduce a new method that leverages large language models and behavior modeling. Empirical evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of our benchmark in enabling systematic assessment of key aspects of machine social intelligence. Our benchmark and code are publicly available at https://github.com/UMass-Embodied-AGI/CHAIC.