pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Track-MDP: Reinforcement Learning for Target Tracking with Controlled Sensing
Authors: Adarsh M. Subramaniam, Argyrios Gerogiannis, James Z. Hare, Venugopal V. Veeravalli
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

State of the art methods for target tracking with sensor management (or controlled sensing) are model-based and are obtained through solutions to Partially Observable Markov Decision Process (POMDP) formulations. In this paper a Reinforcement Learning (RL) approach to the problem is explored for the setting where the motion model for the object/target to be tracked is unknown to the observer. It is assumed that the target dynamics are stationary in time, the state space and the observation space are discrete, and there is complete observability of the location of the target under certain (a priori unknown) sensor control actions. Then, a novel Markov Decision Process (MDP) rather than POMDP formulation is proposed for the tracking problem with controlled sensing, which is termed as Track-MDP. In contrast to the POMDP formulation, the Track-MDP formulation is amenable to an RL based solution. It is shown that the optimal policy for the Track-MDP formulation, which is approximated through RL, is guaranteed to track all significant target paths with certainty. The Track-MDP method is then compared with the optimal POMDP policy, and it is shown that the infinite horizon tracking reward of the optimal Track-MDP policy is the same as that of the optimal POMDP policy. In simulations it is demonstrated that Track-MDP based RL leads to a policy that can track the target with high accuracy.
Dimension-reduced Reconstruction Map Learning for Parameter Estimation in Likelihood-Free Inference Problems
Authors: Rui Zhang, Oksana A. Chkrebtii, Dongbin Xiu
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, parameter estimation

Many application areas rely on models that can be readily simulated but lack a closed-form likelihood, or an accurate approximation under arbitrary parameter values. Existing parameter estimation approaches in this setting are generally approximate. Recent work on using neural network models to reconstruct the mapping from the data space to the parameters from a set of synthetic parameter-data pairs suffers from the curse of dimensionality, resulting in inaccurate estimation as the data size grows. We propose a dimension-reduced approach to likelihood-free estimation which combines the ideas of reconstruction map estimation with dimension-reduction approaches based on subject-specific knowledge. We examine the properties of reconstruction map estimation with and without dimension reduction and explore the trade-off between approximation error due to information loss from reducing the data dimension and approximation error. Numerical examples show that the proposed approach compares favorably with reconstruction map estimation, approximate Bayesian computation, and synthetic likelihood estimation.
PolySinger: Singing-Voice to Singing-Voice Translation from English to Japanese
Authors: Silas Antonisen, Iván López-Espejo
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Singing Voice Synthesis, Speech-to-Speech Translation, Translation

The speech domain prevails in the spotlight for several natural language processing (NLP) tasks while the singing domain remains less explored. The culmination of NLP is the speech-to-speech translation (S2ST) task, referring to translation and synthesis of human speech. A disparity between S2ST and the possible adaptation to the singing domain, which we describe as singing-voice to singing-voice translation (SV2SVT), is becoming prominent as the former is progressing ever faster, while the latter is at a standstill. Singing-voice synthesis systems are overcoming the barrier of multi-lingual synthesis, despite limited attention has been paid to multi-lingual songwriting and song translation. This paper endeavors to determine what is required for successful SV2SVT and proposes PolySinger (\textbf{Poly}glot \textbf{Singer}): the first system for SV2SVT, performing lyrics translation from English to Japanese. A cascaded approach is proposed to establish a framework with a high degree of control which can potentially diminish the disparity between SV2SVT and S2ST. The performance of PolySinger is evaluated by a mean opinion score test with native Japanese speakers. Results and in-depth discussions with test subjects suggest a solid foundation for SV2SVT, but several shortcomings must be overcome, which are discussed for the future of SV2SVT.
PRAGyan -- Connecting the Dots in Tweets
Authors: Rahul Ravi, Gouri Ginde, Jon Rokne
Date: 2024-07-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Knowledge Graphs, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

As social media platforms grow, understanding the underlying reasons behind events and statements becomes crucial for businesses, policymakers, and researchers. This research explores the integration of Knowledge Graphs (KGs) with Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform causal analysis of tweets dataset. The LLM aided analysis techniques often lack depth in uncovering the causes driving observed effects. By leveraging KGs and LLMs, which encode rich semantic relationships and temporal information, this study aims to uncover the complex interplay of factors influencing causal dynamics and compare the results obtained using GPT-3.5 Turbo. We employ a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) model, utilizing a KG stored in a Neo4j (a.k.a PRAGyan) data format, to retrieve relevant context for causal reasoning. Our approach demonstrates that the KG-enhanced LLM RAG can provide improved results when compared to the baseline LLM (GPT-3.5 Turbo) model as the source corpus increases in size. Our qualitative analysis highlights the advantages of combining KGs with LLMs for improved interpretability and actionable insights, facilitating informed decision-making across various domains. Whereas, quantitative analysis using metrics such as BLEU and cosine similarity show that our approach outperforms the baseline by 10\%.
Guitar Chord Diagram Suggestion for Western Popular Music
Authors: Alexandre D'Hooge, Louis Bigo, Ken Déguernel, Nicolas Martin
Date: 2024-07-15 00:00:00

Chord diagrams are used by guitar players to show where and how to play a chord on the fretboard. They are useful to beginners learning chords or for sharing the hand positions required to play a song.However, the diagrams presented on guitar learning toolsare usually selected from an existing databaseand rarely represent the actual positions used by performers.In this paper, we propose a tool which suggests a chord diagram for achord label,taking into account the diagram of the previous chord.Based on statistical analysis of the DadaGP and mySongBook datasets, we show that some chord diagrams are over-represented in western popular musicand that some chords can be played in more than 20 different ways.We argue that taking context into account can improve the variety and the quality of chord diagram suggestion, and compare this approach with a model taking only the current chord label into account.We show that adding previous context improves the F1-score on this task by up to 27% and reduces the propensity of the model to suggest standard open chords.We also define the notion of texture in the context of chord diagrams andshow through a variety of metrics that our model improves textureconsistencywith the previous diagram.
Balanced ID-OOD tradeoff transfer makes query based detectors good few shot learners
Authors: Yuantao Yin, Ping Yin, Xue Xiao, Liang Yan, Siqing Sun, Xiaobo An
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: High-Confidence Computing 2024 5
Tasks: Cross-Domain Few-Shot Object Detection, Few-Shot Object Detection, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Fine-tuning is a popular approach to solve the few-shot object detection problem. In this paper, we attempt to introduce a new perspective on it. We formulate the few-shot novel tasks as a type of distribution shifted from its ground-truth distribution. We introduce the concept of imaginary placeholder masks to show that this distribution shift is essentially a composite of in-distribution(ID) and out-of-distribution(OOD) shifts. Our empirical investigation results show that it is significant to balance the trade-off between adapting to the available few-shot distribution and keeping the distribution-shift robustness of the pre-trained model. We explore improvements in the few-shot fine-tuning transfer in the few-shot object detection(FSOD) settings from three aspects. First, we explore the LinearProbe-Finetuning(LP-FT) technique to balance this trade-off to mitigate the feature distortion problem. Second, we explore the effectiveness of utilizing the protection freezing strategy for query-based object detectors to keep their OOD robustness. Third, we try to utilize ensembling methods to circumvent the feature distortion. All these techniques are integrated into a whole method called BIOT(Balanced ID-OOD Transfer). Evaluation results show that our method is simple yet effective and general to tap the FSOD potential of query-based object detectors. It outperforms the current SOTA method in many FSOD settings and has a promising scaling capability.
Explainable Post hoc Portfolio Management Financial Policy of a Deep Reinforcement Learning agent
Authors: Alejandra de la Rica Escudero, Eduardo C. Garrido-Merchan, Maria Coronado-Vaca
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Feature Importance, Management

Financial portfolio management investment policies computed quantitatively by modern portfolio theory techniques like the Markowitz model rely on a set on assumptions that are not supported by data in high volatility markets. Hence, quantitative researchers are looking for alternative models to tackle this problem. Concretely, portfolio management is a problem that has been successfully addressed recently by Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) approaches. In particular, DRL algorithms train an agent by estimating the distribution of the expected reward of every action performed by an agent given any financial state in a simulator. However, these methods rely on Deep Neural Networks model to represent such a distribution, that although they are universal approximator models, they cannot explain its behaviour, given by a set of parameters that are not interpretable. Critically, financial investors policies require predictions to be interpretable, so DRL agents are not suited to follow a particular policy or explain their actions. In this work, we developed a novel Explainable Deep Reinforcement Learning (XDRL) approach for portfolio management, integrating the Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) with the model agnostic explainable techniques of feature importance, SHAP and LIME to enhance transparency in prediction time. By executing our methodology, we can interpret in prediction time the actions of the agent to assess whether they follow the requisites of an investment policy or to assess the risk of following the agent suggestions. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed approach is the first explainable post hoc portfolio management financial policy of a DRL agent. We empirically illustrate our methodology by successfully identifying key features influencing investment decisions, which demonstrate the ability to explain the agent actions in prediction time.
TTT: A Temporal Refinement Heuristic for Tenuously Tractable Discrete Time Reachability Problems
Authors: Chelsea Sidrane, Jana Tumova
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00

Reachable set computation is an important tool for analyzing control systems. Simulating a control system can show general trends, but a formal tool like reachability analysis can provide guarantees of correctness. Reachability analysis for complex control systems, e.g., with nonlinear dynamics and/or a neural network controller, is often either slow or overly conservative. To address these challenges, much literature has focused on spatial refinement, i.e., tuning the discretization of the input sets and intermediate reachable sets. This paper introduces the idea of temporal refinement: automatically choosing when along the horizon of the reachability problem to execute slow symbolic queries which incur less approximation error versus fast concrete queries which incur more approximation error. Temporal refinement can be combined with other refinement approaches as an additional tool to trade off tractability and tightness in approximate reachable set computation. We introduce a temporal refinement algorithm and demonstrate its effectiveness at computing approximate reachable sets for nonlinear systems with neural network controllers. We calculate reachable sets with varying computational budget and show that our algorithm can generate approximate reachable sets with a similar amount of error to the baseline in 20-70% less time.
The Sticky Path to Expressive Querying: Decidability of Navigational Queries under Existential Rules
Authors: Piotr Ostropolski-Nalewaja, Sebastian Rudolph
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00

Extensive research in the field of ontology-based query answering has led to the identification of numerous fragments of existential rules (also known as tuple-generating dependencies) that exhibit decidable answering of atomic and conjunctive queries. Motivated by the increased theoretical and practical interest in navigational queries, this paper considers the question for which of these fragments decidability of querying extends to regular path queries (RPQs). In fact, decidability of RPQs has recently been shown to generally hold for the comprehensive family of all fragments that come with the guarantee of universal models being reasonably well-shaped (that is, being of finite cliquewidth). Yet, for the second major family of fragments, known as finite unification sets (short: fus), which are based on first-order-rewritability, corresponding results have been largely elusive so far. We complete the picture by showing that RPQ answering over arbitrary fus rulesets is undecidable. On the positive side, we establish that the problem is decidable for the prominent fus subclass of sticky rulesets, with the caveat that a very mild extension of the RPQ formalism turns the problem undecidable again.
Towards Assessing Data Replication in Music Generation with Music Similarity Metrics on Raw Audio
Authors: Roser Batlle-Roca, Wei-Hisang Liao, Xavier Serra, Yuki Mitsufuji, Emilia Gómez
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Music Generation

Recent advancements in music generation are raising multiple concerns about the implications of AI in creative music processes, current business models and impacts related to intellectual property management. A relevant discussion and related technical challenge is the potential replication and plagiarism of the training set in AI-generated music, which could lead to misuse of data and intellectual property rights violations. To tackle this issue, we present the Music Replication Assessment (MiRA) tool: a model-independent open evaluation method based on diverse audio music similarity metrics to assess data replication. We evaluate the ability of five metrics to identify exact replication by conducting a controlled replication experiment in different music genres using synthetic samples. Our results show that the proposed methodology can estimate exact data replication with a proportion higher than 10%. By introducing the MiRA tool, we intend to encourage the open evaluation of music-generative models by researchers, developers, and users concerning data replication, highlighting the importance of the ethical, social, legal, and economic consequences. Code and examples are available for reproducibility purposes.
Stable Audio Open
Authors: Zach Evans, Julian D. Parker, CJ Carr, Zack Zukowski, Josiah Taylor, Jordi Pons
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Audio Generation, Text-to-Music Generation

Open generative models are vitally important for the community, allowing for fine-tunes and serving as baselines when presenting new models. However, most current text-to-audio models are private and not accessible for artists and researchers to build upon. Here we describe the architecture and training process of a new open-weights text-to-audio model trained with Creative Commons data. Our evaluation shows that the model's performance is competitive with the state-of-the-art across various metrics. Notably, the reported FDopenl3 results (measuring the realism of the generations) showcase its potential for high-quality stereo sound synthesis at 44.1kHz.
Panoptic Segmentation of Mammograms with Text-To-Image Diffusion Model
Authors: Kun Zhao, Jakub Prokop, Javier Montalt Tordera, Sadegh Mohammadi
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Instance Segmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Mammography is crucial for breast cancer surveillance and early diagnosis. However, analyzing mammography images is a demanding task for radiologists, who often review hundreds of mammograms daily, leading to overdiagnosis and overtreatment. Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CAD) systems have been developed to assist in this process, but their capabilities, particularly in lesion segmentation, remained limited. With the contemporary advances in deep learning their performance may be improved. Recently, vision-language diffusion models emerged, demonstrating outstanding performance in image generation and transferability to various downstream tasks. We aim to harness their capabilities for breast lesion segmentation in a panoptic setting, which encompasses both semantic and instance-level predictions. Specifically, we propose leveraging pretrained features from a Stable Diffusion model as inputs to a state-of-the-art panoptic segmentation architecture, resulting in accurate delineation of individual breast lesions. To bridge the gap between natural and medical imaging domains, we incorporated a mammography-specific MAM-E diffusion model and BiomedCLIP image and text encoders into this framework. We evaluated our approach on two recently published mammography datasets, CDD-CESM and VinDr-Mammo. For the instance segmentation task, we noted 40.25 AP0.1 and 46.82 AP0.05, as well as 25.44 PQ0.1 and 26.92 PQ0.05. For the semantic segmentation task, we achieved Dice scores of 38.86 and 40.92, respectively.
EmoCAM: Toward Understanding What Drives CNN-based Emotion Recognition
Authors: Youssef Doulfoukar, Laurent Mertens, Joost Vennekens
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Emotion Recognition, image-classification, Image Classification, Image Segmentation, Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Recognition, Semantic Segmentation

Convolutional Neural Networks are particularly suited for image analysis tasks, such as Image Classification, Object Recognition or Image Segmentation. Like all Artificial Neural Networks, however, they are "black box" models, and suffer from poor explainability. This work is concerned with the specific downstream task of Emotion Recognition from images, and proposes a framework that combines CAM-based techniques with Object Detection on a corpus level to better understand on which image cues a particular model, in our case EmoNet, relies to assign a specific emotion to an image. We demonstrate that the model mostly focuses on human characteristics, but also explore the pronounced effect of specific image modifications.
Complementary Learning for Real-World Model Failure Detection
Authors: Daniel Bogdoll, Finn Sartoris, Vincent Geppert, Svetlana Pavlitska, J. Marius Zöllner
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, model

In real-world autonomous driving, deep learning models can experience performance degradation due to distributional shifts between the training data and the driving conditions encountered. As is typical in machine learning, it is difficult to acquire a large and potentially representative labeled test set to validate models in preparation for deployment in the wild. In this work, we introduce complementary learning, where we use learned characteristics from different training paradigms to detect model errors. We demonstrate our approach by learning semantic and predictive motion labels in point clouds in a supervised and self-supervised manner and detect and classify model discrepancies subsequently. We perform a large-scale qualitative analysis and present LidarCODA, the first dataset with labeled anomalies in lidar point clouds, for an extensive quantitative analysis.
How to Blend Concepts in Diffusion Models
Authors: Lorenzo Olearo, Giorgio Longari, Simone Melzi, Alessandro Raganato, Rafael Peñaloza
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Reconstruction

For the last decade, there has been a push to use multi-dimensional (latent) spaces to represent concepts; and yet how to manipulate these concepts or reason with them remains largely unclear. Some recent methods exploit multiple latent representations and their connection, making this research question even more entangled. Our goal is to understand how operations in the latent space affect the underlying concepts. To that end, we explore the task of concept blending through diffusion models. Diffusion models are based on a connection between a latent representation of textual prompts and a latent space that enables image reconstruction and generation. This task allows us to try different text-based combination strategies, and evaluate easily through a visual analysis. Our conclusion is that concept blending through space manipulation is possible, although the best strategy depends on the context of the blend.
Mixed-precision Neural Networks on RISC-V Cores: ISA extensions for Multi-Pumped Soft SIMD Operations
Authors: Giorgos Armeniakos, Alexis Maras, Sotirios Xydis, Dimitrios Soudris
Date: 2024-07-19 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, Quantization

Recent advancements in quantization and mixed-precision approaches offers substantial opportunities to improve the speed and energy efficiency of Neural Networks (NN). Research has shown that individual parameters with varying low precision, can attain accuracies comparable to full-precision counterparts. However, modern embedded microprocessors provide very limited support for mixed-precision NNs regarding both Instruction Set Architecture (ISA) extensions and their hardware design for efficient execution of mixed-precision operations, i.e., introducing several performance bottlenecks due to numerous instructions for data packing and unpacking, arithmetic unit under-utilizations etc. In this work, we bring together, for the first time, ISA extensions tailored to mixed-precision hardware optimizations, targeting energy-efficient DNN inference on leading RISC-V CPU architectures. To this end, we introduce a hardware-software co-design framework that enables cooperative hardware design, mixed-precision quantization, ISA extensions and inference in cycle-accurate emulations. At hardware level, we firstly expand the ALU unit within our proof-of-concept micro-architecture to support configurable fine grained mixed-precision arithmetic operations. Subsequently, we implement multi-pumping to minimize execution latency, with an additional soft SIMD optimization applied for 2-bit operations. At the ISA level, three distinct MAC instructions are encoded extending the RISC-V ISA, and exposed up to the compiler level, each corresponding to a different mixed-precision operational mode. Our extensive experimental evaluation over widely used DNNs and datasets, such as CIFAR10 and ImageNet, demonstrates that our framework can achieve, on average, 15x energy reduction for less than 1% accuracy loss and outperforms the ISA-agnostic state-of-the-art RISC-V cores.