pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Enhancing Lesion Segmentation in PET/CT Imaging with Deep Learning and Advanced Data Preprocessing Techniques
Authors: Jiayi Liu, Qiaoyi Xue, Youdan Feng, Tianming Xu, Kaixin Shen, Chuyun Shen, Yuhang Shi
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diagnostic, Lesion Segmentation, Management

The escalating global cancer burden underscores the critical need for precise diagnostic tools in oncology. This research employs deep learning to enhance lesion segmentation in PET/CT imaging, utilizing a dataset of 900 whole-body FDG-PET/CT and 600 PSMA-PET/CT studies from the AutoPET challenge III. Our methodical approach includes robust preprocessing and data augmentation techniques to ensure model robustness and generalizability. We investigate the influence of non-zero normalization and modifications to the data augmentation pipeline, such as the introduction of RandGaussianSharpen and adjustments to the Gamma transform parameter. This study aims to contribute to the standardization of preprocessing and augmentation strategies in PET/CT imaging, potentially improving the diagnostic accuracy and the personalized management of cancer patients. Our code will be open-sourced and available at https://github.com/jiayiliu-pku/DC2024.
Automated Lesion Segmentation in Whole-Body PET/CT in a multitracer setting
Authors: Qiaoyi Xue, Youdan Feng, Jiayi Liu, Tianming Xu, Kaixin Shen, Chuyun Shen, Yuhang Shi
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Lesion Segmentation, Segmentation

This study explores a workflow for automated segmentation of lesions in FDG and PSMA PET/CT images. Due to the substantial differences in image characteristics between FDG and PSMA, specialized preprocessing steps are required. Utilizing YOLOv8 for data classification, the FDG and PSMA images are preprocessed separately before feeding them into the segmentation models, aiming to improve lesion segmentation accuracy. The study focuses on evaluating the performance of automated segmentation workflow for multitracer PET images. The findings are expected to provide critical insights for enhancing diagnostic workflows and patient-specific treatment plans. Our code will be open-sourced and available at https://github.com/jiayiliu-pku/AP2024.
ELMI: Interactive and Intelligent Sign Language Translation of Lyrics for Song Signing
Authors: Suhyeon Yoo, Khai N. Truong, Young-Ho Kim
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Sign Language Translation, Translation

d/Deaf and hearing song-signers have become prevalent across video-sharing platforms, but translating songs into sign language remains cumbersome and inaccessible. Our formative study revealed the challenges song-signers face, including semantic, syntactic, expressive, and rhythmic considerations in translations. We present ELMI, an accessible song-signing tool that assists in translating lyrics into sign language. ELMI enables users to edit glosses line-by-line, with real-time synced lyric and music video snippets. Users can also chat with a large language model-driven AI to discuss meaning, glossing, emoting, and timing. Through an exploratory study with 13 song-signers, we examined how ELMI facilitates their workflows and how song-signers leverage and receive an LLM-driven chat for translation. Participants successfully adopted ELMI to song-signing, with active discussions throughout. They also reported improved confidence and independence in their translations, finding ELMI encouraging, constructive, and informative. We discuss research and design implications for accessible and culturally sensitive song-signing translation tools.
Explore the Hallucination on Low-level Perception for MLLMs
Authors: Yinan Sun, ZiCheng Zhang, HaoNing Wu, Xiaohong Liu, Weisi Lin, Guangtao Zhai, Xiongkuo Min
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

The rapid development of Multi-modality Large Language Models (MLLMs) has significantly influenced various aspects of industry and daily life, showcasing impressive capabilities in visual perception and understanding. However, these models also exhibit hallucinations, which limit their reliability as AI systems, especially in tasks involving low-level visual perception and understanding. We believe that hallucinations stem from a lack of explicit self-awareness in these models, which directly impacts their overall performance. In this paper, we aim to define and evaluate the self-awareness of MLLMs in low-level visual perception and understanding tasks. To this end, we present QL-Bench, a benchmark settings to simulate human responses to low-level vision, investigating self-awareness in low-level visual perception through visual question answering related to low-level attributes such as clarity and lighting. Specifically, we construct the LLSAVisionQA dataset, comprising 2,990 single images and 1,999 image pairs, each accompanied by an open-ended question about its low-level features. Through the evaluation of 15 MLLMs, we demonstrate that while some models exhibit robust low-level visual capabilities, their self-awareness remains relatively underdeveloped. Notably, for the same model, simpler questions are often answered more accurately than complex ones. However, self-awareness appears to improve when addressing more challenging questions. We hope that our benchmark will motivate further research, particularly focused on enhancing the self-awareness of MLLMs in tasks involving low-level visual perception and understanding.
Benchmarking LLMs in Political Content Text-Annotation: Proof-of-Concept with Toxicity and Incivility Data
Authors: Bastián González-Bustamante
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, text annotation, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

This article benchmarked the ability of OpenAI's GPTs and a number of open-source LLMs to perform annotation tasks on political content. We used a novel protest event dataset comprising more than three million digital interactions and created a gold standard that includes ground-truth labels annotated by human coders about toxicity and incivility on social media. We included in our benchmark Google's Perspective algorithm, which, along with GPTs, was employed throughout their respective APIs while the open-source LLMs were deployed locally. The findings show that Perspective API using a laxer threshold, GPT-4o, and Nous Hermes 2 Mixtral outperform other LLM's zero-shot classification annotations. In addition, Nous Hermes 2 and Mistral OpenOrca, with a smaller number of parameters, are able to perform the task with high performance, being attractive options that could offer good trade-offs between performance, implementing costs and computing time. Ancillary findings using experiments setting different temperature levels show that although GPTs tend to show not only excellent computing time but also overall good levels of reliability, only open-source LLMs ensure full reproducibility in the annotation.
From Challenges and Pitfalls to Recommendations and Opportunities: Implementing Federated Learning in Healthcare
Authors: Ming Li, Pengcheng Xu, Junjie Hu, Zeyu Tang, Guang Yang
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Federated learning holds great potential for enabling large-scale healthcare research and collaboration across multiple centres while ensuring data privacy and security are not compromised. Although numerous recent studies suggest or utilize federated learning based methods in healthcare, it remains unclear which ones have potential clinical utility. This review paper considers and analyzes the most recent studies up to May 2024 that describe federated learning based methods in healthcare. After a thorough review, we find that the vast majority are not appropriate for clinical use due to their methodological flaws and/or underlying biases which include but are not limited to privacy concerns, generalization issues, and communication costs. As a result, the effectiveness of federated learning in healthcare is significantly compromised. To overcome these challenges, we provide recommendations and promising opportunities that might be implemented to resolve these problems and improve the quality of model development in federated learning with healthcare.
Automatic Control With Human-Like Reasoning: Exploring Language Model Embodied Air Traffic Agents
Authors: Justas Andriuškevičius, Junzi Sun
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Recent developments in language models have created new opportunities in air traffic control studies. The current focus is primarily on text and language-based use cases. However, these language models may offer a higher potential impact in the air traffic control domain, thanks to their ability to interact with air traffic environments in an embodied agent form. They also provide a language-like reasoning capability to explain their decisions, which has been a significant roadblock for the implementation of automatic air traffic control. This paper investigates the application of a language model-based agent with function-calling and learning capabilities to resolve air traffic conflicts without human intervention. The main components of this research are foundational large language models, tools that allow the agent to interact with the simulator, and a new concept, the experience library. An innovative part of this research, the experience library, is a vector database that stores synthesized knowledge that agents have learned from interactions with the simulations and language models. To evaluate the performance of our language model-based agent, both open-source and closed-source models were tested. The results of our study reveal significant differences in performance across various configurations of the language model-based agents. The best-performing configuration was able to solve almost all 120 but one imminent conflict scenarios, including up to four aircraft at the same time. Most importantly, the agents are able to provide human-level text explanations on traffic situations and conflict resolution strategies.
Exploring Utility in a Real-World Warehouse Optimization Problem: Formulation Based on Quantum Annealers and Preliminary Results
Authors: Eneko Osaba, Esther Villar-Rodriguez, Antón Asla
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00

In the current NISQ-era, one of the major challenges faced by researchers and practitioners lies in figuring out how to combine quantum and classical computing in the most efficient and innovative way. In this paper, we present a mechanism coined as Quantum Initialization for Warehouse Optimization Problem that resorts to D-Wave's Quantum Annealer. The module has been specifically designed to be embedded into already existing classical software dedicated to the optimization of a real-world industrial problem. We preliminary tested the implemented mechanism through a two-phase experiment against the classical version of the software.
GFlowNet Pretraining with Inexpensive Rewards
Authors: Mohit Pandey, Gopeshh Subbaraj, Emmanuel Bengio
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Design, Unsupervised Pre-training

Generative Flow Networks (GFlowNets), a class of generative models have recently emerged as a suitable framework for generating diverse and high-quality molecular structures by learning from unnormalized reward distributions. Previous works in this direction often restrict exploration by using predefined molecular fragments as building blocks, limiting the chemical space that can be accessed. In this work, we introduce Atomic GFlowNets (A-GFNs), a foundational generative model leveraging individual atoms as building blocks to explore drug-like chemical space more comprehensively. We propose an unsupervised pre-training approach using offline drug-like molecule datasets, which conditions A-GFNs on inexpensive yet informative molecular descriptors such as drug-likeliness, topological polar surface area, and synthetic accessibility scores. These properties serve as proxy rewards, guiding A-GFNs towards regions of chemical space that exhibit desirable pharmacological properties. We further our method by implementing a goal-conditioned fine-tuning process, which adapts A-GFNs to optimize for specific target properties. In this work, we pretrain A-GFN on the ZINC15 offline dataset and employ robust evaluation metrics to show the effectiveness of our approach when compared to other relevant baseline methods in drug design.
Training Safe Neural Networks with Global SDP Bounds
Authors: Roman Soletskyi, David "davidad" Dalrymple
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness

This paper presents a novel approach to training neural networks with formal safety guarantees using semidefinite programming (SDP) for verification. Our method focuses on verifying safety over large, high-dimensional input regions, addressing limitations of existing techniques that focus on adversarial robustness bounds. We introduce an ADMM-based training scheme for an accurate neural network classifier on the Adversarial Spheres dataset, achieving provably perfect recall with input dimensions up to $d=40$. This work advances the development of reliable neural network verification methods for high-dimensional systems, with potential applications in safe RL policies.
Anatomy of Machines for Markowitz: Decision-Focused Learning for Mean-Variance Portfolio Optimization
Authors: Junhyeong Lee, Inwoo Tae, YongJae lee
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Decision Making, Portfolio Optimization, Prediction

Markowitz laid the foundation of portfolio theory through the mean-variance optimization (MVO) framework. However, the effectiveness of MVO is contingent on the precise estimation of expected returns, variances, and covariances of asset returns, which are typically uncertain. Machine learning models are becoming useful in estimating uncertain parameters, and such models are trained to minimize prediction errors, such as mean squared errors (MSE), which treat prediction errors uniformly across assets. Recent studies have pointed out that this approach would lead to suboptimal decisions and proposed Decision-Focused Learning (DFL) as a solution, integrating prediction and optimization to improve decision-making outcomes. While studies have shown DFL's potential to enhance portfolio performance, the detailed mechanisms of how DFL modifies prediction models for MVO remain unexplored. This study aims to investigate how DFL adjusts stock return prediction models to optimize decisions in MVO, addressing the question: "MSE treats the errors of all assets equally, but how does DFL reduce errors of different assets differently?" Answering this will provide crucial insights into optimal stock return prediction for constructing efficient portfolios.
Reliable Multi-View Learning with Conformal Prediction for Aortic Stenosis Classification in Echocardiography
Authors: Ang Nan Gu, Michael Tsang, Hooman Vaseli, Teresa Tsang, Purang Abolmaesumi
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Anatomy, Conformal Prediction, MULTI-VIEW LEARNING

The fundamental problem with ultrasound-guided diagnosis is that the acquired images are often 2-D cross-sections of a 3-D anatomy, potentially missing important anatomical details. This limitation leads to challenges in ultrasound echocardiography, such as poor visualization of heart valves or foreshortening of ventricles. Clinicians must interpret these images with inherent uncertainty, a nuance absent in machine learning's one-hot labels. We propose Re-Training for Uncertainty (RT4U), a data-centric method to introduce uncertainty to weakly informative inputs in the training set. This simple approach can be incorporated to existing state-of-the-art aortic stenosis classification methods to further improve their accuracy. When combined with conformal prediction techniques, RT4U can yield adaptively sized prediction sets which are guaranteed to contain the ground truth class to a high accuracy. We validate the effectiveness of RT4U on three diverse datasets: a public (TMED-2) and a private AS dataset, along with a CIFAR-10-derived toy dataset. Results show improvement on all the datasets.
ExploreSelf: Fostering User-driven Exploration and Reflection on Personal Challenges with Adaptive Guidance by Large Language Models
Authors: Inhwa Song, SoHyun Park, Sachin R. Pendse, Jessica Lee Schleider, Munmun De Choudhury, Young-Ho Kim
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00

Expressing stressful experiences in words is proven to improve mental and physical health, but individuals often disengage with writing interventions as they struggle to organize their thoughts and emotions. Reflective prompts have been used to provide direction, and large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the potential to provide tailored guidance. However, current systems often limit users' flexibility to direct their reflections. We thus present ExploreSelf, an LLM-driven application designed to empower users to control their reflective journey, providing adaptive support through dynamically generated questions. Through an exploratory study with 19 participants, we examine how participants explore and reflect on personal challenges using ExploreSelf. Our findings demonstrate that participants valued the flexible navigation of adaptive guidance to control their reflective journey, leading to deeper engagement and insight. Building on our findings, we discuss the implications of designing LLM-driven tools that facilitate user-driven and effective reflection of personal challenges.
KAN v.s. MLP for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Haihong Guo, Fengxin Li, Jiao Li, Hongyan Liu
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: D4RL, Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, Offline RL, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) is an emerging neural network architecture in machine learning. It has greatly interested the research community about whether KAN can be a promising alternative of the commonly used Multi-Layer Perceptions (MLP). Experiments in various fields demonstrated that KAN-based machine learning can achieve comparable if not better performance than MLP-based methods, but with much smaller parameter scales and are more explainable. In this paper, we explore the incorporation of KAN into the actor and critic networks for offline reinforcement learning (RL). We evaluated the performance, parameter scales, and training efficiency of various KAN and MLP based conservative Q-learning (CQL) on the the classical D4RL benchmark for offline RL. Our study demonstrates that KAN can achieve performance close to the commonly used MLP with significantly fewer parameters. This provides us an option to choose the base networks according to the requirements of the offline RL tasks.
Self-supervised Learning for Acoustic Few-Shot Classification
Authors: Jingyong Liang, Bernd Meyer, Isaac Ning Lee, Thanh-Toan Do
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Contrastive Learning, Mamba, Self-Supervised Learning, State Space Models

Labelled data are limited and self-supervised learning is one of the most important approaches for reducing labelling requirements. While it has been extensively explored in the image domain, it has so far not received the same amount of attention in the acoustic domain. Yet, reducing labelling is a key requirement for many acoustic applications. Specifically in bioacoustic, there are rarely sufficient labels for fully supervised learning available. This has led to the widespread use of acoustic recognisers that have been pre-trained on unrelated data for bioacoustic tasks. We posit that training on the actual task data and combining self-supervised pre-training with few-shot classification is a superior approach that has the ability to deliver high accuracy even when only a few labels are available. To this end, we introduce and evaluate a new architecture that combines CNN-based preprocessing with feature extraction based on state space models (SSMs). This combination is motivated by the fact that CNN-based networks alone struggle to capture temporal information effectively, which is crucial for classifying acoustic signals. SSMs, specifically S4 and Mamba, on the other hand, have been shown to have an excellent ability to capture long-range dependencies in sequence data. We pre-train this architecture using contrastive learning on the actual task data and subsequent fine-tuning with an extremely small amount of labelled data. We evaluate the performance of this proposed architecture for ($n$-shot, $n$-class) classification on standard benchmarks as well as real-world data. Our evaluation shows that it outperforms state-of-the-art architectures on the few-shot classification problem.
COSCO: A Sharpness-Aware Training Framework for Few-shot Multivariate Time Series Classification
Authors: Jesus Barreda, Ashley Gomez, Ruben Puga, Kaixiong Zhou, Li Zhang
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Time Series, Time Series Classification

Multivariate time series classification is an important task with widespread domains of applications. Recently, deep neural networks (DNN) have achieved state-of-the-art performance in time series classification. However, they often require large expert-labeled training datasets which can be infeasible in practice. In few-shot settings, i.e. only a limited number of samples per class are available in training data, DNNs show a significant drop in testing accuracy and poor generalization ability. In this paper, we propose to address these problems from an optimization and a loss function perspective. Specifically, we propose a new learning framework named COSCO consisting of a sharpness-aware minimization (SAM) optimization and a Prototypical loss function to improve the generalization ability of DNN for multivariate time series classification problems under few-shot setting. Our experiments demonstrate our proposed method outperforms the existing baseline methods. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/JRB9/COSCO.
AACessTalk: Fostering Communication between Minimally Verbal Autistic Children and Parents with Contextual Guidance and Card Recommendation
Authors: Dasom Choi, SoHyun Park, Kyungah Lee, Hwajung Hong, Young-Ho Kim
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00

As minimally verbal autistic (MVA) children communicate with parents through few words and nonverbal cues, parents often struggle to encourage their children to express subtle emotions and needs and to grasp their nuanced signals. We present AACessTalk, a tablet-based, AI-mediated communication system that facilitates meaningful exchanges between an MVA child and a parent. AACessTalk provides real-time guides to the parent to engage the child in conversation and, in turn, recommends contextual vocabulary cards to the child. Through a two-week deployment study with 11 MVA child-parent dyads, we examine how AACessTalk fosters everyday conversation practice and mutual engagement. Our findings show high engagement from all dyads, leading to increased frequency of conversation and turn-taking. AACessTalk also encouraged parents to explore their own interaction strategies and empowered the children to have more agency in communication. We discuss the implications of designing technologies for balanced communication dynamics in parent-MVA child interaction.