pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Analysis, Modeling and Design of Personalized Digital Learning Environment
Authors: Sanjaya Khanal, Shiva Raj Pokhrel
Date: 2024-05-17 00:00:00

This research analyzes, models and develops a novel Digital Learning Environment (DLE) fortified by the innovative Private Learning Intelligence (PLI) framework. The proposed PLI framework leverages federated machine learning (FL) techniques to autonomously construct and continuously refine personalized learning models for individual learners, ensuring robust privacy protection. Our approach is pivotal in advancing DLE capabilities, empowering learners to actively participate in personalized real-time learning experiences. The integration of PLI within a DLE also streamlines instructional design and development demands for personalized teaching/learning. We seek ways to establish a foundation for the seamless integration of FL into learning systems, offering a transformative approach to personalized learning in digital environments. Our implementation details and code are made public.
Simulation-Based Benchmarking of Reinforcement Learning Agents for Personalized Retail Promotions
Authors: Yu Xia, Sriram Narayanamoorthy, Zhengyuan Zhou, Joshua Mabry
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The development of open benchmarking platforms could greatly accelerate the adoption of AI agents in retail. This paper presents comprehensive simulations of customer shopping behaviors for the purpose of benchmarking reinforcement learning (RL) agents that optimize coupon targeting. The difficulty of this learning problem is largely driven by the sparsity of customer purchase events. We trained agents using offline batch data comprising summarized customer purchase histories to help mitigate this effect. Our experiments revealed that contextual bandit and deep RL methods that are less prone to over-fitting the sparse reward distributions significantly outperform static policies. This study offers a practical framework for simulating AI agents that optimize the entire retail customer journey. It aims to inspire the further development of simulation tools for retail AI systems.
Agent Design Pattern Catalogue: A Collection of Architectural Patterns for Foundation Model based Agents
Authors: Yue Liu, Sin Kit Lo, Qinghua Lu, Liming Zhu, Dehai Zhao, Xiwei Xu, Stefan Harrer, Jon Whittle
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Systematic Literature Review

Foundation model-enabled generative artificial intelligence facilitates the development and implementation of agents, which can leverage distinguished reasoning and language processing capabilities to takes a proactive, autonomous role to pursue users' goals. Nevertheless, there is a lack of systematic knowledge to guide practitioners in designing the agents considering challenges of goal-seeking (including generating instrumental goals and plans), such as hallucinations inherent in foundation models, explainability of reasoning process, complex accountability, etc. To address this issue, we have performed a systematic literature review to understand the state-of-the-art foundation model-based agents and the broader ecosystem. In this paper, we present a pattern catalogue consisting of 18 architectural patterns with analyses of the context, forces, and trade-offs as the outcomes from the previous literature review. We propose a decision model for selecting the patterns. The proposed catalogue can provide holistic guidance for the effective use of patterns, and support the architecture design of foundation model-based agents by facilitating goal-seeking and plan generation.
The AI Collaborator: Bridging Human-AI Interaction in Educational and Professional Settings
Authors: Mohammad Amin Samadi, Spencer JaQuay, Jing Gu, Nia Nixon
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00

AI Collaborator, powered by OpenAI's GPT-4, is a groundbreaking tool designed for human-AI collaboration research. Its standout feature is the ability for researchers to create customized AI personas for diverse experimental setups using a user-friendly interface. This functionality is essential for simulating various interpersonal dynamics in team settings. AI Collaborator excels in mimicking different team behaviors, enabled by its advanced memory system and a sophisticated personality framework. Researchers can tailor AI personas along a spectrum from dominant to cooperative, enhancing the study of their impact on team processes. The tool's modular design facilitates integration with digital platforms like Slack, making it versatile for various research scenarios. AI Collaborator is thus a crucial resource for exploring human-AI team dynamics more profoundly.
Optimal Text-Based Time-Series Indices
Authors: David Ardia, Keven Bluteau
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Time Series

We propose an approach to construct text-based time-series indices in an optimal way--typically, indices that maximize the contemporaneous relation or the predictive performance with respect to a target variable, such as inflation. We illustrate our methodology with a corpus of news articles from the Wall Street Journal by optimizing text-based indices focusing on tracking the VIX index and inflation expectations. Our results highlight the superior performance of our approach compared to existing indices.
Dynamic In-context Learning with Conversational Models for Data Extraction and Materials Property Prediction
Authors: Chinedu Ekuma
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Property Prediction

The advent of natural language processing and large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized the extraction of data from unstructured scholarly papers. However, ensuring data trustworthiness remains a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce PropertyExtractor, an open-source tool that leverages advanced conversational LLMs like Google gemini-pro and OpenAI gpt-4, blends zero-shot with few-shot in-context learning, and employs engineered prompts for the dynamic refinement of structured information hierarchies - enabling autonomous, efficient, scalable, and accurate identification, extraction, and verification of material property data. Our tests on material data demonstrate precision and recall that exceed 95\% with an error rate of approximately 9%, highlighting the effectiveness and versatility of the toolkit. Finally, databases for 2D material thicknesses, a critical parameter for device integration, and energy bandgap values are developed using PropertyExtractor. Specifically for the thickness database, the rapid evolution of the field has outpaced both experimental measurements and computational methods, creating a significant data gap. Our work addresses this gap and showcases the potential of PropertyExtractor as a reliable and efficient tool for the autonomous generation of various material property databases, advancing the field.
Tell me more: Intent Fulfilment Framework for Enhancing User Experiences in Conversational XAI
Authors: Anjana Wijekoon, David Corsar, Nirmalie Wiratunga, Kyle Martin, Pedram Salimi
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

The evolution of Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) has emphasised the significance of meeting diverse user needs. The approaches to identifying and addressing these needs must also advance, recognising that explanation experiences are subjective, user-centred processes that interact with users towards a better understanding of AI decision-making. This paper delves into the interrelations in multi-faceted XAI and examines how different types of explanations collaboratively meet users' XAI needs. We introduce the Intent Fulfilment Framework (IFF) for creating explanation experiences. The novelty of this paper lies in recognising the importance of "follow-up" on explanations for obtaining clarity, verification and/or substitution. Moreover, the Explanation Experience Dialogue Model integrates the IFF and "Explanation Followups" to provide users with a conversational interface for exploring their explanation needs, thereby creating explanation experiences. Quantitative and qualitative findings from our comparative user study demonstrate the impact of the IFF in improving user engagement, the utility of the AI system and the overall user experience. Overall, we reinforce the principle that "one explanation does not fit all" to create explanation experiences that guide the complex interaction through conversation.
Positional encoding is not the same as context: A study on positional encoding for sequential recommendation
Authors: Alejo Lopez-Avila, Jinhua Du, Abbas Shimary, Ze Li
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems, Sequential Recommendation

The rapid growth of streaming media and e-commerce has driven advancements in recommendation systems, particularly Sequential Recommendation Systems (SRS). These systems employ users' interaction histories to predict future preferences. While recent research has focused on architectural innovations like transformer blocks and feature extraction, positional encodings, crucial for capturing temporal patterns, have received less attention. These encodings are often conflated with contextual, such as the temporal footprint, which previous works tend to treat as interchangeable with positional information. This paper highlights the critical distinction between temporal footprint and positional encodings, demonstrating that the latter offers unique relational cues between items, which the temporal footprint alone cannot provide. Through extensive experimentation on eight Amazon datasets and subsets, we assess the impact of various encodings on performance metrics and training stability. We introduce new positional encodings and investigate integration strategies that improve both metrics and stability, surpassing state-of-the-art results at the time of this work's initial preprint. Importantly, we demonstrate that selecting the appropriate encoding is not only key to better performance but also essential for building robust, reliable SRS models.
Memory-efficient Energy-adaptive Inference of Pre-Trained Models on Batteryless Embedded Systems
Authors: Pietro Farina, Subrata Biswas, Eren Yıldız, Khakim Akhunov, Saad Ahmed, Bashima Islam, Kasım Sinan Yıldırım
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00

Batteryless systems frequently face power failures, requiring extra runtime buffers to maintain inference progress and leaving only a memory space for storing ultra-tiny deep neural networks (DNNs). Besides, making these models responsive to stochastic energy harvesting dynamics during inference requires a balance between inference accuracy, latency, and energy overhead. Recent works on compression mostly focus on time and memory, but often ignore energy dynamics or significantly reduce the accuracy of pre-trained DNNs. Existing energy-adaptive inference works modify the architecture of pre-trained models and have significant memory overhead. Thus, energy-adaptive and accurate inference of pre-trained DNNs on batteryless devices with extreme memory constraints is more challenging than traditional microcontrollers. We combat these issues by proposing FreeML, a framework to optimize pre-trained DNN models for memory-efficient and energy-adaptive inference on batteryless systems. FreeML comprises (1) a novel compression technique to reduce the model footprint and runtime memory requirements simultaneously, making them executable on extremely memory-constrained batteryless platforms; and (2) the first early exit mechanism that uses a single exit branch for all exit points to terminate inference at any time, making models energy-adaptive with minimal memory overhead. Our experiments showed that FreeML reduces the model sizes by up to $95 \times$, supports adaptive inference with a $2.03-19.65 \times$ less memory overhead, and provides significant time and energy benefits with only a negligible accuracy drop compared to the state-of-the-art.
Vision Transformers for End-to-End Vision-Based Quadrotor Obstacle Avoidance
Authors: Anish Bhattacharya, Nishanth Rao, Dhruv Parikh, Pratik Kunapuli, Yuwei Wu, Yuezhan Tao, Nikolai Matni, Vijay Kumar
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00

We demonstrate the capabilities of an attention-based end-to-end approach for high-speed vision-based quadrotor obstacle avoidance in dense, cluttered environments, with comparison to various state-of-the-art learning architectures. Quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have tremendous maneuverability when flown fast; however, as flight speed increases, traditional model-based approaches to navigation via independent perception, mapping, planning, and control modules breaks down due to increased sensor noise, compounding errors, and increased processing latency. Thus, learning-based, end-to-end vision-to-control networks have shown to have great potential for online control of these fast robots through cluttered environments. We train and compare convolutional, U-Net, and recurrent architectures against vision transformer (ViT) models for depth image-to-control in high-fidelity simulation, observing that ViT models are more effective than others as quadrotor speeds increase and in generalization to unseen environments, while the addition of recurrence further improves performance while reducing quadrotor energy cost across all tested flight speeds. We assess performance at speeds of up to 7m/s in simulation and hardware. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to utilize vision transformers for end-to-end vision-based quadrotor control.
AmazUtah_NLP at SemEval-2024 Task 9: A MultiChoice Question Answering System for Commonsense Defying Reasoning
Authors: Mina Ghashami, Soumya Smruti Mishra
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice, Question Answering, Sentence

The SemEval 2024 BRAINTEASER task represents a pioneering venture in Natural Language Processing (NLP) by focusing on lateral thinking, a dimension of cognitive reasoning that is often overlooked in traditional linguistic analyses. This challenge comprises of Sentence Puzzle and Word Puzzle subtasks and aims to test language models' capacity for divergent thinking. In this paper, we present our approach to the BRAINTEASER task. We employ a holistic strategy by leveraging cutting-edge pre-trained models in multiple choice architecture, and diversify the training data with Sentence and Word Puzzle datasets. To gain further improvement, we fine-tuned the model with synthetic humor or jokes dataset and the RiddleSense dataset which helped augmenting the model's lateral thinking abilities. Empirical results show that our approach achieve 92.5% accuracy in Sentence Puzzle subtask and 80.2% accuracy in Word Puzzle subtask.
A Polynomial-Time Approximation for Pairwise Fair $k$-Median Clustering
Authors: Sayan Bandyapadhyay, Eden Chlamtáč, Zachary Friggstad, Mahya Jamshidian, Yury Makarychev, Ali Vakilian
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Fairness

In this work, we study pairwise fair clustering with $\ell \ge 2$ groups, where for every cluster $C$ and every group $i \in [\ell]$, the number of points in $C$ from group $i$ must be at most $t$ times the number of points in $C$ from any other group $j \in [\ell]$, for a given integer $t$. To the best of our knowledge, only bi-criteria approximation and exponential-time algorithms follow for this problem from the prior work on fair clustering problems when $\ell > 2$. In our work, focusing on the $\ell > 2$ case, we design the first polynomial-time $O(k^2\cdot \ell \cdot t)$-approximation for this problem with $k$-median cost that does not violate the fairness constraints. We complement our algorithmic result by providing hardness of approximation results, which show that our problem even when $\ell=2$ is almost as hard as the popular uniform capacitated $k$-median, for which no polynomial-time algorithm with an approximation factor of $o(\log k)$ is known.
Dealing Doubt: Unveiling Threat Models in Gradient Inversion Attacks under Federated Learning, A Survey and Taxonomy
Authors: Yichuan Shi, Olivera Kotevska, Viktor Reshniak, Abhishek Singh, Ramesh Raskar
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

Federated Learning (FL) has emerged as a leading paradigm for decentralized, privacy preserving machine learning training. However, recent research on gradient inversion attacks (GIAs) have shown that gradient updates in FL can leak information on private training samples. While existing surveys on GIAs have focused on the honest-but-curious server threat model, there is a dearth of research categorizing attacks under the realistic and far more privacy-infringing cases of malicious servers and clients. In this paper, we present a survey and novel taxonomy of GIAs that emphasize FL threat models, particularly that of malicious servers and clients. We first formally define GIAs and contrast conventional attacks with the malicious attacker. We then summarize existing honest-but-curious attack strategies, corresponding defenses, and evaluation metrics. Critically, we dive into attacks with malicious servers and clients to highlight how they break existing FL defenses, focusing specifically on reconstruction methods, target model architectures, target data, and evaluation metrics. Lastly, we discuss open problems and future research directions.
Reinforcement learning
Authors: Sarod Yatawatta
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Astronomy, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Scheduling

Observing celestial objects and advancing our scientific knowledge about them involves tedious planning, scheduling, data collection and data post-processing. Many of these operational aspects of astronomy are guided and executed by expert astronomers. Reinforcement learning is a mechanism where we (as humans and astronomers) can teach agents of artificial intelligence to perform some of these tedious tasks. In this paper, we will present a state of the art overview of reinforcement learning and how it can benefit astronomy.
Monitizer: Automating Design and Evaluation of Neural Network Monitors
Authors: Muqsit Azeem, Marta Grobelna, Sudeep Kanav, Jan Kretinsky, Stefanie Mohr, Sabine Rieder
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The behavior of neural networks (NNs) on previously unseen types of data (out-of-distribution or OOD) is typically unpredictable. This can be dangerous if the network's output is used for decision-making in a safety-critical system. Hence, detecting that an input is OOD is crucial for the safe application of the NN. Verification approaches do not scale to practical NNs, making runtime monitoring more appealing for practical use. While various monitors have been suggested recently, their optimization for a given problem, as well as comparison with each other and reproduction of results, remain challenging. We present a tool for users and developers of NN monitors. It allows for (i) application of various types of monitors from the literature to a given input NN, (ii) optimization of the monitor's hyperparameters, and (iii) experimental evaluation and comparison to other approaches. Besides, it facilitates the development of new monitoring approaches. We demonstrate the tool's usability on several use cases of different types of users as well as on a case study comparing different approaches from recent literature.
Learning to Predict Mutation Effects of Protein-Protein Interactions by Microenvironment-aware Hierarchical Prompt Learning
Authors: Lirong Wu, Yijun Tian, Haitao Lin, Yufei Huang, Siyuan Li, Nitesh V Chawla, Stan Z. Li
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Learning

Protein-protein bindings play a key role in a variety of fundamental biological processes, and thus predicting the effects of amino acid mutations on protein-protein binding is crucial. To tackle the scarcity of annotated mutation data, pre-training with massive unlabeled data has emerged as a promising solution. However, this process faces a series of challenges: (1) complex higher-order dependencies among multiple (more than paired) structural scales have not yet been fully captured; (2) it is rarely explored how mutations alter the local conformation of the surrounding microenvironment; (3) pre-training is costly, both in data size and computational burden. In this paper, we first construct a hierarchical prompt codebook to record common microenvironmental patterns at different structural scales independently. Then, we develop a novel codebook pre-training task, namely masked microenvironment modeling, to model the joint distribution of each mutation with their residue types, angular statistics, and local conformational changes in the microenvironment. With the constructed prompt codebook, we encode the microenvironment around each mutation into multiple hierarchical prompts and combine them to flexibly provide information to wild-type and mutated protein complexes about their microenvironmental differences. Such a hierarchical prompt learning framework has demonstrated superior performance and training efficiency over state-of-the-art pre-training-based methods in mutation effect prediction and a case study of optimizing human antibodies against SARS-CoV-2.
Networking Systems for Video Anomaly Detection: A Tutorial and Survey
Authors: Jing Liu, Yang Liu, Jieyu Lin, Jielin Li, Liang Cao, Peng Sun, Bo Hu, Liang Song, Azzedine Boukerche, Victor C. M. Leung
Date: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Edge-computing, Survey, Video Anomaly Detection

The increasing utilization of surveillance cameras in smart cities, coupled with the surge of online video applications, has heightened concerns regarding public security and privacy protection, which propelled automated Video Anomaly Detection (VAD) into a fundamental research task within the Artificial Intelligence (AI) community. With the advancements in deep learning and edge computing, VAD has made significant progress and advances synergized with emerging applications in smart cities and video internet, which has moved beyond the conventional research scope of algorithm engineering to deployable Networking Systems for VAD (NSVAD), a practical hotspot for intersection exploration in the AI, IoVT, and computing fields. In this article, we delineate the foundational assumptions, learning frameworks, and applicable scenarios of various deep learning-driven VAD routes, offering an exhaustive tutorial for novices in NSVAD. In addition, this article elucidates core concepts by reviewing recent advances and typical solutions and aggregating available research resources accessible at https://github.com/fdjingliu/NSVAD. Lastly, this article projects future development trends and discusses how the integration of AI and computing technologies can address existing research challenges and promote open opportunities, serving as an insightful guide for prospective researchers and engineers.