pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
CLIPer: Hierarchically Improving Spatial Representation of CLIP for Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Lin Sun, Jiale Cao, Jin Xie, Xiaoheng Jiang, Yanwei Pang
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Open Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Open-Vocabulary Semantic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Contrastive Language-Image Pre-training (CLIP) exhibits strong zero-shot classification ability on various image-level tasks, leading to the research to adapt CLIP for pixel-level open-vocabulary semantic segmentation without additional training. The key is to improve spatial representation of image-level CLIP, such as replacing self-attention map at last layer with self-self attention map or vision foundation model based attention map. In this paper, we present a novel hierarchical framework, named CLIPer, that hierarchically improves spatial representation of CLIP. The proposed CLIPer includes an early-layer fusion module and a fine-grained compensation module. We observe that, the embeddings and attention maps at early layers can preserve spatial structural information. Inspired by this, we design the early-layer fusion module to generate segmentation map with better spatial coherence. Afterwards, we employ a fine-grained compensation module to compensate the local details using the self-attention maps of diffusion model. We conduct the experiments on seven segmentation datasets. Our proposed CLIPer achieves the state-of-the-art performance on these datasets. For instance, using ViT-L, CLIPer has the mIoU of 69.8% and 43.3% on VOC and COCO Object, outperforming ProxyCLIP by 9.2% and 4.1% respectively.
Mirror Target YOLO: An Improved YOLOv8 Method with Indirect Vision for Heritage Buildings Fire Detection
Authors: Jian Liang, JunSheng Cheng
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Fire Detection

Fires can cause severe damage to heritage buildings, making timely fire detection essential. Traditional dense cabling and drilling can harm these structures, so reducing the number of cameras to minimize such impact is challenging. Additionally, avoiding false alarms due to noise sensitivity and preserving the expertise of managers in fire-prone areas is crucial. To address these needs, we propose a fire detection method based on indirect vision, called Mirror Target YOLO (MITA-YOLO). MITA-YOLO integrates indirect vision deployment and an enhanced detection module. It uses mirror angles to achieve indirect views, solving issues with limited visibility in irregular spaces and aligning each indirect view with the target monitoring area. The Target-Mask module is designed to automatically identify and isolate the indirect vision areas in each image, filtering out non-target areas. This enables the model to inherit managers' expertise in assessing fire-risk zones, improving focus and resistance to interference in fire detection.In our experiments, we created an 800-image fire dataset with indirect vision. Results show that MITA-YOLO significantly reduces camera requirements while achieving superior detection performance compared to other mainstream models.
Improved GUI Grounding via Iterative Narrowing
Authors: Anthony Nguyen
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Natural Language Visual Grounding, Visual Prompting

Graphical User Interface (GUI) grounding plays a crucial role in enhancing the capabilities of Vision-Language Model (VLM) agents. While general VLMs, such as GPT-4V, demonstrate strong performance across various tasks, their proficiency in GUI grounding remains suboptimal. Recent studies have focused on fine-tuning these models specifically for zero-shot GUI grounding, yielding significant improvements over baseline performance. We introduce a visual prompting framework that employs an iterative narrowing mechanism to further improve the performance of both general and fine-tuned models in GUI grounding. For evaluation, we tested our method on a comprehensive benchmark comprising various UI platforms and provided the code to reproduce our results.
Revisiting the Integration of Convolution and Attention for Vision Backbone
Authors: Lei Zhu, Xinjiang Wang, Wayne Zhang, Rynson W. H. Lau
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation, Weakly supervised Semantic Segmentation, Weakly-Supervised Semantic Segmentation

Convolutions (Convs) and multi-head self-attentions (MHSAs) are typically considered alternatives to each other for building vision backbones. Although some works try to integrate both, they apply the two operators simultaneously at the finest pixel granularity. With Convs responsible for per-pixel feature extraction already, the question is whether we still need to include the heavy MHSAs at such a fine-grained level. In fact, this is the root cause of the scalability issue w.r.t. the input resolution for vision transformers. To address this important problem, we propose in this work to use MSHAs and Convs in parallel \textbf{at different granularity levels} instead. Specifically, in each layer, we use two different ways to represent an image: a fine-grained regular grid and a coarse-grained set of semantic slots. We apply different operations to these two representations: Convs to the grid for local features, and MHSAs to the slots for global features. A pair of fully differentiable soft clustering and dispatching modules is introduced to bridge the grid and set representations, thus enabling local-global fusion. Through extensive experiments on various vision tasks, we empirically verify the potential of the proposed integration scheme, named \textit{GLMix}: by offloading the burden of fine-grained features to light-weight Convs, it is sufficient to use MHSAs in a few (e.g., 64) semantic slots to match the performance of recent state-of-the-art backbones, while being more efficient. Our visualization results also demonstrate that the soft clustering module produces a meaningful semantic grouping effect with only IN1k classification supervision, which may induce better interpretability and inspire new weakly-supervised semantic segmentation approaches. Code will be available at \url{https://github.com/rayleizhu/GLMix}.
Whack-a-Chip: The Futility of Hardware-Centric Export Controls
Authors: Ritwik Gupta, Leah Walker, Andrew W. Reddie
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00

U.S. export controls on semiconductors are widely known to be permeable, with the People's Republic of China (PRC) steadily creating state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) models with exfiltrated chips. This paper presents the first concrete, public evidence of how leading PRC AI labs evade and circumvent U.S. export controls. We examine how Chinese companies, notably Tencent, are not only using chips that are restricted under U.S. export controls but are also finding ways to circumvent these regulations by using software and modeling techniques that maximize less capable hardware. Specifically, we argue that Tencent's ability to power its Hunyuan-Large model with non-export controlled NVIDIA H20s exemplifies broader gains in efficiency in machine learning that have eroded the moat that the United States initially built via its existing export controls. Finally, we examine the implications of this finding for the future of the United States' export control strategy.
Resolving Multiple-Dynamic Model Uncertainty in Hypothesis-Driven Belief-MDPs
Authors: Ofer Dagan, Tyler Becker, Zachary N. Sunberg
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00

When human operators of cyber-physical systems encounter surprising behavior, they often consider multiple hypotheses that might explain it. In some cases, taking information-gathering actions such as additional measurements or control inputs given to the system can help resolve uncertainty and determine the most accurate hypothesis. The task of optimizing these actions can be formulated as a belief-space Markov decision process that we call a hypothesis-driven belief MDP. Unfortunately, this problem suffers from the curse of history similar to a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). To plan in continuous domains, an agent needs to reason over countlessly many possible action-observation histories, each resulting in a different belief over the unknown state. The problem is exacerbated in the hypothesis-driven context because each action-observation pair spawns a different belief for each hypothesis, leading to additional branching. This paper considers the case in which each hypothesis corresponds to a different dynamic model in an underlying POMDP. We present a new belief MDP formulation that: (i) enables reasoning over multiple hypotheses, (ii) balances the goals of determining the (most likely) correct hypothesis and performing well in the underlying POMDP, and (iii) can be solved with sparse tree search.
Landing Trajectory Prediction for UAS Based on Generative Adversarial Network
Authors: Jun Xiang, Drake Essick, Luiz Gonzalez Bautista, Junfei Xie, Jun Chen
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Trajectory Prediction

Models for trajectory prediction are an essential component of many advanced air mobility studies. These models help aircraft detect conflict and plan avoidance maneuvers, which is especially important in Unmanned Aircraft systems (UAS) landing management due to the congested airspace near vertiports. In this paper, we propose a landing trajectory prediction model for UAS based on Generative Adversarial Network (GAN). The GAN is a prestigious neural network that has been developed for many years. In previous research, GAN has achieved many state-of-the-art results in many generation tasks. The GAN consists of one neural network generator and a neural network discriminator. Because of the learning capacity of the neural networks, the generator is capable to understand the features of the sample trajectory. The generator takes the previous trajectory as input and outputs some random status of a flight. According to the results of the experiences, the proposed model can output more accurate predictions than the baseline method(GMR) in various datasets. To evaluate the proposed model, we also create a real UAV landing dataset that includes more than 2600 trajectories of drone control manually by real pilots.
Using Formal Models, Safety Shields and Certified Control to Validate AI-Based Train Systems
Authors: Jan Gruteser, Jan Roßbach, Fabian Vu, Michael Leuschel
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00

The certification of autonomous systems is an important concern in science and industry. The KI-LOK project explores new methods for certifying and safely integrating AI components into autonomous trains. We pursued a two-layered approach: (1) ensuring the safety of the steering system by formal analysis using the B method, and (2) improving the reliability of the perception system with a runtime certificate checker. This work links both strategies within a demonstrator that runs simulations on the formal model, controlled by the real AI output and the real certificate checker. The demonstrator is integrated into the validation tool ProB. This enables runtime monitoring, runtime verification, and statistical validation of formal safety properties using a formal B model. Consequently, one can detect and analyse potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses of the AI and the certificate checker. We apply these techniques to a signal detection case study and present our findings.
Synthesising Robust Controllers for Robot Collectives with Recurrent Tasks: A Case Study
Authors: Till Schnittka, Mario Gleirscher
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00

When designing correct-by-construction controllers for autonomous collectives, three key challenges are the task specification, the modelling, and its use at practical scale. In this paper, we focus on a simple yet useful abstraction for high-level controller synthesis for robot collectives with optimisation goals (e.g., maximum cleanliness, minimum energy consumption) and recurrence (e.g., re-establish contamination and charge thresholds) and safety (e.g., avoid full discharge, mutually exclusive room occupation) constraints. Due to technical limitations (related to scalability and using constraints in the synthesis), we simplify our graph-based setting from a stochastic two-player game into a single-player game on a partially observable Markov decision process (POMDP). Robustness against environmental uncertainty is encoded via partial observability. Linear-time correctness properties are verified separately after synthesising the POMDP strategy. We contribute at-scale guidance on POMDP modelling and controller synthesis for tasked robot collectives exemplified by the scenario of battery-driven robots responsible for cleaning public buildings with utilisation constraints.
RV4Chatbot: Are Chatbots Allowed to Dream of Electric Sheep?
Authors: Andrea Gatti, Viviana Mascardi, Angelo Ferrando
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Chatbots have become integral to various application domains, including those with safety-critical considerations. As a result, there is a pressing need for methods that ensure chatbots consistently adhere to expected, safe behaviours. In this paper, we introduce RV4Chatbot, a Runtime Verification framework designed to monitor deviations in chatbot behaviour. We formalise expected behaviours as interaction protocols between the user and the chatbot. We present the RV4Chatbot design and describe two implementations that instantiate it: RV4Rasa, for monitoring chatbots created with the Rasa framework, and RV4Dialogflow, for monitoring Dialogflow chatbots. Additionally, we detail experiments conducted in a factory automation scenario using both RV4Rasa and RV4Dialogflow.
ROSMonitoring 2.0: Extending ROS Runtime Verification to Services and Ordered Topics
Authors: Maryam Ghaffari Saadat, Angelo Ferrando, Louise A. Dennis, Michael Fisher
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00

Formal verification of robotic applications presents challenges due to their hybrid nature and distributed architecture. This paper introduces ROSMonitoring 2.0, an extension of ROSMonitoring designed to facilitate the monitoring of both topics and services while considering the order in which messages are published and received. The framework has been enhanced to support these novel features for ROS1 -- and partially ROS2 environments -- offering improved real-time support, security, scalability, and interoperability. We discuss the modifications made to accommodate these advancements and present results obtained from a case study involving the runtime monitoring of specific components of a fire-fighting Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle (UAV).
Contrasting local and global modeling with machine learning and satellite data: A case study estimating tree canopy height in African savannas
Authors: Esther Rolf, Lucia Gordon, Milind Tambe, Andrew Davies
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00

While advances in machine learning with satellite imagery (SatML) are facilitating environmental monitoring at a global scale, developing SatML models that are accurate and useful for local regions remains critical to understanding and acting on an ever-changing planet. As increasing attention and resources are being devoted to training SatML models with global data, it is important to understand when improvements in global models will make it easier to train or fine-tune models that are accurate in specific regions. To explore this question, we contrast local and global training paradigms for SatML through a case study of tree canopy height (TCH) mapping in the Karingani Game Reserve, Mozambique. We find that recent advances in global TCH mapping do not necessarily translate to better local modeling abilities in our study region. Specifically, small models trained only with locally-collected data outperform published global TCH maps, and even outperform globally pretrained models that we fine-tune using local data. Analyzing these results further, we identify specific points of conflict and synergy between local and global modeling paradigms that can inform future research toward aligning local and global performance objectives in geospatial machine learning.
UnifiedCrawl: Aggregated Common Crawl for Affordable Adaptation of LLMs on Low-Resource Languages
Authors: Bethel Melesse Tessema, Akhil Kedia, Tae-Sun Chung
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

Large language models (LLMs) under-perform on low-resource languages due to limited training data. We present a method to efficiently collect text data for low-resource languages from the entire Common Crawl corpus. Our approach, UnifiedCrawl, filters and extracts common crawl using minimal compute resources, yielding mono-lingual datasets much larger than previously available sources. We demonstrate that leveraging this data to fine-tuning multilingual LLMs via efficient adapter methods (QLoRA) significantly boosts performance on the low-resource language, while minimizing VRAM usage. Our experiments show large improvements in language modeling perplexity and an increase in few-shot prompting scores. Our work and released source code provide an affordable approach to improve LLMs for low-resource languages using consumer hardware. Our source code is available here at https://github.com/bethelmelesse/unifiedcrawl.
BugSpotter: Automated Generation of Code Debugging Exercises
Authors: Victor-Alexandru Pădurean, Paul Denny, Adish Singla
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00

Debugging is an essential skill when learning to program, yet its instruction and emphasis often vary widely across introductory courses. In the era of code-generating large language models (LLMs), the ability for students to reason about code and identify errors is increasingly important. However, students frequently resort to trial-and-error methods to resolve bugs without fully understanding the underlying issues. Developing the ability to identify and hypothesize the cause of bugs is crucial but can be time-consuming to teach effectively through traditional means. This paper introduces BugSpotter, an innovative tool that leverages an LLM to generate buggy code from a problem description and verify the synthesized bugs via a test suite. Students interact with BugSpotter by designing failing test cases, where the buggy code's output differs from the expected result as defined by the problem specification. This not only provides opportunities for students to enhance their debugging skills, but also to practice reading and understanding problem specifications. We deployed BugSpotter in a large classroom setting and compared the debugging exercises it generated to exercises hand-crafted by an instructor for the same problems. We found that the LLM-generated exercises produced by BugSpotter varied in difficulty and were well-matched to the problem specifications. Importantly, the LLM-generated exercises were comparable to those manually created by instructors with respect to student performance, suggesting that BugSpotter could be an effective and efficient aid for learning debugging.
Neuro-Symbolic Query Optimization in Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Maribel Acosta, Chang Qin, Tim Schwabe
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Navigate

This chapter delves into the emerging field of neuro-symbolic query optimization for knowledge graphs (KGs), presenting a comprehensive exploration of how neural and symbolic techniques can be integrated to enhance query processing. Traditional query optimizers in knowledge graphs rely heavily on symbolic methods, utilizing dataset summaries, statistics, and cost models to select efficient execution plans. However, these approaches often suffer from misestimations and inaccuracies, particularly when dealing with complex queries or large-scale datasets. Recent advancements have introduced neural models, which capture non-linear aspects of query optimization, offering promising alternatives to purely symbolic methods. In this chapter, we introduce neuro-symbolic query optimizers, a novel approach that combines the strengths of symbolic reasoning with the adaptability of neural computation. We discuss the architecture of these hybrid systems, highlighting the interplay between neural and symbolic components to improve the optimizer's ability to navigate the search space and produce efficient execution plans. Additionally, the chapter reviews existing neural components tailored for optimizing queries over knowledge graphs and examines the limitations and challenges in deploying neuro-symbolic query optimizers in real-world environments.
Generating Realistic Adversarial Examples for Business Processes using Variational Autoencoders
Authors: Alexander Stevens, Jari Peeperkorn, Johannes De Smedt, Jochen De Weerdt
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Predictive Process Monitoring

In predictive process monitoring, predictive models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks, where input perturbations can lead to incorrect predictions. Unlike in computer vision, where these perturbations are designed to be imperceptible to the human eye, the generation of adversarial examples in predictive process monitoring poses unique challenges. Minor changes to the activity sequences can create improbable or even impossible scenarios to occur due to underlying constraints such as regulatory rules or process constraints. To address this, we focus on generating realistic adversarial examples tailored to the business process context, in contrast to the imperceptible, pixel-level changes commonly seen in computer vision adversarial attacks. This paper introduces two novel latent space attacks, which generate adversaries by adding noise to the latent space representation of the input data, rather than directly modifying the input attributes. These latent space methods are domain-agnostic and do not rely on process-specific knowledge, as we restrict the generation of adversarial examples to the learned class-specific data distributions by directly perturbing the latent space representation of the business process executions. We evaluate these two latent space methods with six other adversarial attacking methods on eleven real-life event logs and four predictive models. The first three attacking methods directly permute the activities of the historically observed business process executions. The fourth method constrains the adversarial examples to lie within the same data distribution as the original instances, by projecting the adversarial examples to the original data distribution.
Knowledge Graphs, Large Language Models, and Hallucinations: An NLP Perspective
Authors: Ernests Lavrinovics, Russa Biswas, Johannes Bjerva, Katja Hose
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering, Text Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized Natural Language Processing (NLP) based applications including automated text generation, question answering, chatbots, and others. However, they face a significant challenge: hallucinations, where models produce plausible-sounding but factually incorrect responses. This undermines trust and limits the applicability of LLMs in different domains. Knowledge Graphs (KGs), on the other hand, provide a structured collection of interconnected facts represented as entities (nodes) and their relationships (edges). In recent research, KGs have been leveraged to provide context that can fill gaps in an LLM understanding of certain topics offering a promising approach to mitigate hallucinations in LLMs, enhancing their reliability and accuracy while benefiting from their wide applicability. Nonetheless, it is still a very active area of research with various unresolved open problems. In this paper, we discuss these open challenges covering state-of-the-art datasets and benchmarks as well as methods for knowledge integration and evaluating hallucinations. In our discussion, we consider the current use of KGs in LLM systems and identify future directions within each of these challenges.