pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Creating a Gen-AI based Track and Trace Assistant MVP (SuperTracy) for PostNL
Authors: Mohammad Reshadati
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The developments in the field of generative AI has brought a lot of opportunities for companies, for instance to improve efficiency in customer service and automating tasks. PostNL, the biggest parcel and E-commerce corporation of the Netherlands wants to use generative AI to enhance the communication around track and trace of parcels. During the internship a Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is created to showcase the value of using generative AI technologies, to enhance parcel tracking, analyzing the parcel's journey and being able to communicate about it in an easy to understand manner. The primary goal was to develop an in-house LLM-based system, reducing dependency on external platforms and establishing the feasibility of a dedicated generative AI team within the company. This multi-agent LLM based system aimed to construct parcel journey stories and identify logistical disruptions with heightened efficiency and accuracy. The research involved deploying a sophisticated AI-driven communication system, employing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for enhanced response precision, and optimizing large language models (LLMs) tailored to domain specific tasks. The MVP successfully implemented a multi-agent open-source LLM system, called SuperTracy. SuperTracy is capable of autonomously managing a broad spectrum of user inquiries and improving internal knowledge handling. Results and evaluation demonstrated technological innovation and feasibility, notably in communication about the track and trace of a parcel, which exceeded initial expectations. These advancements highlight the potential of AI-driven solutions in logistics, suggesting many opportunities for further refinement and broader implementation within PostNL operational framework.
Incorporating Like-Minded Peers to Overcome Friend Data Sparsity in Session-Based Social Recommendations
Authors: Chunyan An, Yunhan Li, Qiang Yang, Winston K. G. Seah, Zhixu Li, Conghao Yang
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Session-Based Recommendations

Session-based Social Recommendation (SSR) leverages social relationships within online networks to enhance the performance of Session-based Recommendation (SR). However, existing SSR algorithms often encounter the challenge of "friend data sparsity". Moreover, significant discrepancies can exist between the purchase preferences of social network friends and those of the target user, reducing the influence of friends relative to the target user's own preferences. To address these challenges, this paper introduces the concept of "Like-minded Peers" (LMP), representing users whose preferences align with the target user's current session based on their historical sessions. This is the first work, to our knowledge, that uses LMP to enhance the modeling of social influence in SSR. This approach not only alleviates the problem of friend data sparsity but also effectively incorporates users with similar preferences to the target user. We propose a novel model named Transformer Encoder with Graph Attention Aggregator Recommendation (TEGAARec), which includes the TEGAA module and the GAT-based social aggregation module. The TEGAA module captures and merges both long-term and short-term interests for target users and LMP users. Concurrently, the GAT-based social aggregation module is designed to aggregate the target users' dynamic interests and social influence in a weighted manner. Extensive experiments on four real-world datasets demonstrate the efficacy and superiority of our proposed model and ablation studies are done to illustrate the contributions of each component in TEGAARec.
Decision Transformer for Enhancing Neural Local Search on the Job Shop Scheduling Problem
Authors: Constantin Waubert de Puiseau, Fabian Wolz, Merlin Montag, Jannik Peters, Hasan Tercan, Tobias Meisen
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Job Shop Scheduling, Scheduling

The job shop scheduling problem (JSSP) and its solution algorithms have been of enduring interest in both academia and industry for decades. In recent years, machine learning (ML) is playing an increasingly important role in advancing existing and building new heuristic solutions for the JSSP, aiming to find better solutions in shorter computation times. In this paper we build on top of a state-of-the-art deep reinforcement learning (DRL) agent, called Neural Local Search (NLS), which can efficiently and effectively control a large local neighborhood search on the JSSP. In particular, we develop a method for training the decision transformer (DT) algorithm on search trajectories taken by a trained NLS agent to further improve upon the learned decision-making sequences. Our experiments show that the DT successfully learns local search strategies that are different and, in many cases, more effective than those of the NLS agent itself. In terms of the tradeoff between solution quality and acceptable computational time needed for the search, the DT is particularly superior in application scenarios where longer computational times are acceptable. In this case, it makes up for the longer inference times required per search step, which are caused by the larger neural network architecture, through better quality decisions per step. Thereby, the DT achieves state-of-the-art results for solving the JSSP with ML-enhanced search.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in Software Testing
Authors: Ahmed Ramadan, Husam Yasin, Burhan Pektas
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection, software testing

Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) have significantly impacted various industries, including software development. Software testing, a crucial part of the software development lifecycle (SDLC), ensures the quality and reliability of software products. Traditionally, software testing has been a labor-intensive process requiring significant manual effort. However, the advent of AI and ML has transformed this landscape by introducing automation and intelligent decision-making capabilities. AI and ML technologies enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of software testing by automating complex tasks such as test case generation, test execution, and result analysis. These technologies reduce the time required for testing and improve the accuracy of defect detection, ultimately leading to higher quality software. AI can predict potential areas of failure by analyzing historical data and identifying patterns, which allows for more targeted and efficient testing. This paper explores the role of AI and ML in software testing by reviewing existing literature, analyzing current tools and techniques, and presenting case studies that demonstrate the practical benefits of these technologies. The literature review provides a comprehensive overview of the advancements in AI and ML applications in software testing, highlighting key methodologies and findings from various studies. The analysis of current tools showcases the capabilities of popular AI-driven testing tools such as Eggplant AI, Test.ai, Selenium, Appvance, Applitools Eyes, Katalon Studio, and Tricentis Tosca, each offering unique features and advantages. Case studies included in this paper illustrate real-world applications of AI and ML in software testing, showing significant improvements in testing efficiency, accuracy, and overall software quality.
LLM-Assisted Visual Analytics: Opportunities and Challenges
Authors: Maeve Hutchinson, Radu Jianu, Aidan Slingsby, Pranava Madhyastha
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, multimodal interaction, Navigate, Text Generation

We explore the integration of large language models (LLMs) into visual analytics (VA) systems to transform their capabilities through intuitive natural language interactions. We survey current research directions in this emerging field, examining how LLMs are integrated into data management, language interaction, visualisation generation, and language generation processes. We highlight the new possibilities that LLMs bring to VA, especially how they can change VA processes beyond the usual use cases. We especially highlight building new visualisation-language models, allowing access of a breadth of domain knowledge, multimodal interaction, and opportunities with guidance. Finally, we carefully consider the prominent challenges of using current LLMs in VA tasks. Our discussions in this paper aim to guide future researchers working on LLM-assisted VA systems and help them navigate common obstacles when developing these systems.
Deconfounded Causality-aware Parameter-Efficient Fine-Tuning for Problem-Solving Improvement of LLMs
Authors: Ruoyu Wang, Xiaoxuan Li, Lina Yao
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Text Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable efficiency in tackling various tasks based on human instructions, but studies reveal that they often struggle with tasks requiring reasoning, such as math or physics. This limitation raises questions about whether LLMs truly comprehend embedded knowledge or merely learn to replicate the token distribution without a true understanding of the content. In this paper, we delve into this problem and aim to enhance the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. First, we investigate if the model has genuine reasoning capabilities by visualizing the text generation process at the attention and representation level. Then, we formulate the reasoning process of LLMs into a causal framework, which provides a formal explanation of the problems observed in the visualization. Finally, building upon this causal framework, we propose Deconfounded Causal Adaptation (DCA), a novel parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method to enhance the model's reasoning capabilities by encouraging the model to extract the general problem-solving skills and apply these skills to different questions. Experiments show that our method outperforms the baseline consistently across multiple benchmarks, and with only 1.2M tunable parameters, we achieve better or comparable results to other fine-tuning methods. This demonstrates the effectiveness and efficiency of our method in improving the overall accuracy and reliability of LLMs.
RouterRetriever: Routing over a Mixture of Expert Embedding Models
Authors: Hyunji Lee, Luca Soldaini, Arman Cohan, Minjoon Seo, Kyle Lo
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Retrieval

Information retrieval methods often rely on a single embedding model trained on large, general-domain datasets like MSMARCO. While this approach can produce a retriever with reasonable overall performance, they often underperform models trained on domain-specific data when testing on their respective domains. Prior work in information retrieval has tackled this through multi-task training, but the idea of routing over a mixture of domain-specific expert retrievers remains unexplored despite the popularity of such ideas in language model generation research. In this work, we introduce RouterRetriever, a retrieval model that leverages a mixture of domain-specific experts by using a routing mechanism to select the most appropriate expert for each query. RouterRetriever is lightweight and allows easy addition or removal of experts without additional training. Evaluation on the BEIR benchmark demonstrates that RouterRetriever outperforms both models trained on MSMARCO (+2.1 absolute nDCG@10) and multi-task models (+3.2). This is achieved by employing our routing mechanism, which surpasses other routing techniques (+1.8 on average) commonly used in language modeling. Furthermore, the benefit generalizes well to other datasets, even in the absence of a specific expert on the dataset. RouterRetriever is the first work to demonstrate the advantages of routing over a mixture of domain-specific expert embedding models as an alternative to a single, general-purpose embedding model, especially when retrieving from diverse, specialized domains.
Neural Networks with LSTM and GRU in Modeling Active Fires in the Amazon
Authors: Ramon Tavares, Ricardo Olinda
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

This study presents a comprehensive methodology for modeling and forecasting the historical time series of active fire spots detected by the AQUA\_M-T satellite in the Amazon, Brazil. The approach employs a mixed Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) model, combining Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) and Gated Recurrent Unit (GRU) architectures to predict the monthly accumulations of daily detected active fire spots. Data analysis revealed a consistent seasonality over time, with annual maximum and minimum values tending to repeat at the same periods each year. The primary objective is to verify whether the forecasts capture this inherent seasonality through machine learning techniques. The methodology involved careful data preparation, model configuration, and training using cross-validation with two seeds, ensuring that the data generalizes well to both the test and validation sets for both seeds. The results indicate that the combined LSTM and GRU model delivers excellent forecasting performance, demonstrating its effectiveness in capturing complex temporal patterns and modeling the observed time series. This research significantly contributes to the application of deep learning techniques in environmental monitoring, specifically in forecasting active fire spots. The proposed approach highlights the potential for adaptation to other time series forecasting challenges, opening new opportunities for research and development in machine learning and prediction of natural phenomena. Keywords: Time Series Forecasting; Recurrent Neural Networks; Deep Learning.
Independence Constrained Disentangled Representation Learning from Epistemological Perspective
Authors: Ruoyu Wang, Lina Yao
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Representation Learning

Disentangled Representation Learning aims to improve the explainability of deep learning methods by training a data encoder that identifies semantically meaningful latent variables in the data generation process. Nevertheless, there is no consensus regarding a universally accepted definition for the objective of disentangled representation learning. In particular, there is a considerable amount of discourse regarding whether should the latent variables be mutually independent or not. In this paper, we first investigate these arguments on the interrelationships between latent variables by establishing a conceptual bridge between Epistemology and Disentangled Representation Learning. Then, inspired by these interdisciplinary concepts, we introduce a two-level latent space framework to provide a general solution to the prior arguments on this issue. Finally, we propose a novel method for disentangled representation learning by employing an integration of mutual information constraint and independence constraint within the Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) framework. Experimental results demonstrate that our proposed method consistently outperforms baseline approaches in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. The method exhibits strong performance across multiple commonly used metrics and demonstrates a great capability in disentangling various semantic factors, leading to an improved quality of controllable generation, which consequently benefits the explainability of the algorithm.
Causality-Aware Transformer Networks for Robotic Navigation
Authors: Ruoyu Wang, Yao Liu, Yuanjiang Cao, Lina Yao
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Visual Navigation

Current research in Visual Navigation reveals opportunities for improvement. First, the direct adoption of RNNs and Transformers often overlooks the specific differences between Embodied AI and traditional sequential data modelling, potentially limiting its performance in Embodied AI tasks. Second, the reliance on task-specific configurations, such as pre-trained modules and dataset-specific logic, compromises the generalizability of these methods. We address these constraints by initially exploring the unique differences between Navigation tasks and other sequential data tasks through the lens of Causality, presenting a causal framework to elucidate the inadequacies of conventional sequential methods for Navigation. By leveraging this causal perspective, we propose Causality-Aware Transformer (CAT) Networks for Navigation, featuring a Causal Understanding Module to enhance the models's Environmental Understanding capability. Meanwhile, our method is devoid of task-specific inductive biases and can be trained in an End-to-End manner, which enhances the method's generalizability across various contexts. Empirical evaluations demonstrate that our methodology consistently surpasses benchmark performances across a spectrum of settings, tasks and simulation environments. Extensive ablation studies reveal that the performance gains can be attributed to the Causal Understanding Module, which demonstrates effectiveness and efficiency in both Reinforcement Learning and Supervised Learning settings.
PoseTalk: Text-and-Audio-based Pose Control and Motion Refinement for One-Shot Talking Head Generation
Authors: Jun Ling, Yiwen Wang, Han Xue, Rong Xie, Li Song
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Pose Prediction, Rhythm, Talking Head Generation

While previous audio-driven talking head generation (THG) methods generate head poses from driving audio, the generated poses or lips cannot match the audio well or are not editable. In this study, we propose \textbf{PoseTalk}, a THG system that can freely generate lip-synchronized talking head videos with free head poses conditioned on text prompts and audio. The core insight of our method is using head pose to connect visual, linguistic, and audio signals. First, we propose to generate poses from both audio and text prompts, where the audio offers short-term variations and rhythm correspondence of the head movements and the text prompts describe the long-term semantics of head motions. To achieve this goal, we devise a Pose Latent Diffusion (PLD) model to generate motion latent from text prompts and audio cues in a pose latent space. Second, we observe a loss-imbalance problem: the loss for the lip region contributes less than 4\% of the total reconstruction loss caused by both pose and lip, making optimization lean towards head movements rather than lip shapes. To address this issue, we propose a refinement-based learning strategy to synthesize natural talking videos using two cascaded networks, i.e., CoarseNet, and RefineNet. The CoarseNet estimates coarse motions to produce animated images in novel poses and the RefineNet focuses on learning finer lip motions by progressively estimating lip motions from low-to-high resolutions, yielding improved lip-synchronization performance. Experiments demonstrate our pose prediction strategy achieves better pose diversity and realness compared to text-only or audio-only, and our video generator model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in synthesizing talking videos with natural head motions. Project: https://junleen.github.io/projects/posetalk.
OpenFact at CheckThat! 2024: Combining Multiple Attack Methods for Effective Adversarial Text Generation
Authors: Włodzimierz Lewoniewski, Piotr Stolarski, Milena Stróżyna, Elzbieta Lewańska, Aleksandra Wojewoda, Ewelina Księżniak, Marcin Sawiński
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Adversarial Text, Ensemble Learning, Misinformation, text-classification, Text Classification, Text Generation

This paper presents the experiments and results for the CheckThat! Lab at CLEF 2024 Task 6: Robustness of Credibility Assessment with Adversarial Examples (InCrediblAE). The primary objective of this task was to generate adversarial examples in five problem domains in order to evaluate the robustness of widely used text classification methods (fine-tuned BERT, BiLSTM, and RoBERTa) when applied to credibility assessment issues. This study explores the application of ensemble learning to enhance adversarial attacks on natural language processing (NLP) models. We systematically tested and refined several adversarial attack methods, including BERT-Attack, Genetic algorithms, TextFooler, and CLARE, on five datasets across various misinformation tasks. By developing modified versions of BERT-Attack and hybrid methods, we achieved significant improvements in attack effectiveness. Our results demonstrate the potential of modification and combining multiple methods to create more sophisticated and effective adversarial attack strategies, contributing to the development of more robust and secure systems.
DNN-GDITD: Out-of-distribution detection via Deep Neural Network based Gaussian Descriptor for Imbalanced Tabular Data
Authors: Priyanka Chudasama, Anil Surisetty, Aakarsh Malhotra, Alok Singh
Date: 2024-09-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Detection

Classification tasks present challenges due to class imbalances and evolving data distributions. Addressing these issues requires a robust method to handle imbalances while effectively detecting out-of-distribution (OOD) samples not encountered during training. This study introduces a novel OOD detection algorithm designed for tabular datasets, titled Deep Neural Network-based Gaussian Descriptor for Imbalanced Tabular Data (DNN-GDITD). The DNN-GDITD algorithm can be placed on top of any DNN to facilitate better classification of imbalanced data and OOD detection using spherical decision boundaries. Using a combination of Push, Score-based, and focal losses, DNN-GDITD assigns confidence scores to test data points, categorizing them as known classes or as an OOD sample. Extensive experimentation on tabular datasets demonstrates the effectiveness of DNN-GDITD compared to three OOD algorithms. Evaluation encompasses imbalanced and balanced scenarios on diverse tabular datasets, including a synthetic financial dispute dataset and publicly available tabular datasets like Gas Sensor, Drive Diagnosis, and MNIST, showcasing DNN-GDITD's versatility.
Evaluating Environments Using Exploratory Agents
Authors: Bobby Khaleque, Mike Cook, Jeremy Gow
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Game Design

Exploration is a key part of many video games. We investigate the using an exploratory agent to provide feedback on the design of procedurally generated game levels, 5 engaging levels and 5 unengaging levels. We expand upon a framework introduced in previous research which models motivations for exploration and introduce a fitness function for evaluating an environment's potential for exploration. Our study showed that our exploratory agent can clearly distinguish between engaging and unengaging levels. The findings suggest that our agent has the potential to serve as an effective tool for assessing procedurally generated levels, in terms of exploration. This work contributes to the growing field of AI-driven game design by offering new insights into how game environments can be evaluated and optimised for player exploration.
AdvSecureNet: A Python Toolkit for Adversarial Machine Learning
Authors: Melih Catal, Manuel Günther
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Machine learning models are vulnerable to adversarial attacks. Several tools have been developed to research these vulnerabilities, but they often lack comprehensive features and flexibility. We introduce AdvSecureNet, a PyTorch based toolkit for adversarial machine learning that is the first to natively support multi-GPU setups for attacks, defenses, and evaluation. It is the first toolkit that supports both CLI and API interfaces and external YAML configuration files to enhance versatility and reproducibility. The toolkit includes multiple attacks, defenses and evaluation metrics. Rigiorous software engineering practices are followed to ensure high code quality and maintainability. The project is available as an open-source project on GitHub at https://github.com/melihcatal/advsecurenet and installable via PyPI.