pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Volvo Discovery Challenge at ECML-PKDD 2024
Authors: Mahmoud Rahat, Peyman Sheikholharam Mashhadi, Sławomir Nowaczyk, Shamik Choudhury, Leo Petrin, Thorsteinn Rognvaldsson, Andreas Voskou, Carlo Metta, Claudio Savelli
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00

This paper presents an overview of the Volvo Discovery Challenge, held during the ECML-PKDD 2024 conference. The challenge's goal was to predict the failure risk of an anonymized component in Volvo trucks using a newly published dataset. The test data included observations from two generations (gen1 and gen2) of the component, while the training data was provided only for gen1. The challenge attracted 52 data scientists from around the world who submitted a total of 791 entries. We provide a brief description of the problem definition, challenge setup, and statistics about the submissions. In the section on winning methodologies, the first, second, and third-place winners of the competition briefly describe their proposed methods and provide GitHub links to their implemented code. The shared code can be interesting as an advanced methodology for researchers in the predictive maintenance domain. The competition was hosted on the Codabench platform.
NSSR-DIL: Null-Shot Image Super-Resolution Using Deep Identity Learning
Authors: Sree Rama Vamsidhar S, Rama Krishna Gorthi
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Super-Resolution, Super-Resolution

The present State-of-the-Art (SotA) Image Super-Resolution (ISR) methods employ Deep Learning (DL) techniques using a large amount of image data. The primary limitation to extending the existing SotA ISR works for real-world instances is their computational and time complexities. In this paper, contrary to the existing methods, we present a novel and computationally efficient ISR algorithm that is independent of the image dataset to learn the ISR task. The proposed algorithm reformulates the ISR task from generating the Super-Resolved (SR) images to computing the inverse of the kernels that span the degradation space. We introduce Deep Identity Learning, exploiting the identity relation between the degradation and inverse degradation models. The proposed approach neither relies on the ISR dataset nor on a single input low-resolution (LR) image (like the self-supervised method i.e. ZSSR) to model the ISR task. Hence we term our model as Null-Shot Super-Resolution Using Deep Identity Learning (NSSR-DIL). The proposed NSSR-DIL model requires fewer computational resources, at least by an order of 10, and demonstrates a competitive performance on benchmark ISR datasets. Another salient aspect of our proposition is that the NSSR-DIL framework detours retraining the model and remains the same for varying scale factors like X2, X3, and X4. This makes our highly efficient ISR model more suitable for real-world applications.
Jailbreaking Large Language Models with Symbolic Mathematics
Authors: Emet Bethany, Mazal Bethany, Juan Arturo Nolazco Flores, Sumit Kumar Jha, Peyman Najafirad
Date: 2024-09-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming

Recent advancements in AI safety have led to increased efforts in training and red-teaming large language models (LLMs) to mitigate unsafe content generation. However, these safety mechanisms may not be comprehensive, leaving potential vulnerabilities unexplored. This paper introduces MathPrompt, a novel jailbreaking technique that exploits LLMs' advanced capabilities in symbolic mathematics to bypass their safety mechanisms. By encoding harmful natural language prompts into mathematical problems, we demonstrate a critical vulnerability in current AI safety measures. Our experiments across 13 state-of-the-art LLMs reveal an average attack success rate of 73.6\%, highlighting the inability of existing safety training mechanisms to generalize to mathematically encoded inputs. Analysis of embedding vectors shows a substantial semantic shift between original and encoded prompts, helping explain the attack's success. This work emphasizes the importance of a holistic approach to AI safety, calling for expanded red-teaming efforts to develop robust safeguards across all potential input types and their associated risks.
A Green Multi-Attribute Client Selection for Over-The-Air Federated Learning: A Grey-Wolf-Optimizer Approach
Authors: Maryam Ben Driss, Essaid Sabir, Halima Elbiaze, Abdoulaye Baniré Diallo, Mohamed Sadik
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Fairness, Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) has gained attention across various industries for its capability to train machine learning models without centralizing sensitive data. While this approach offers significant benefits such as privacy preservation and decreased communication overhead, it presents several challenges, including deployment complexity and interoperability issues, particularly in heterogeneous scenarios or resource-constrained environments. Over-the-air (OTA) FL was introduced to tackle these challenges by disseminating model updates without necessitating direct device-to-device connections or centralized servers. However, OTA-FL brought forth limitations associated with heightened energy consumption and network latency. In this paper, we propose a multi-attribute client selection framework employing the grey wolf optimizer (GWO) to strategically control the number of participants in each round and optimize the OTA-FL process while considering accuracy, energy, delay, reliability, and fairness constraints of participating devices. We evaluate the performance of our multi-attribute client selection approach in terms of model loss minimization, convergence time reduction, and energy efficiency. In our experimental evaluation, we assessed and compared the performance of our approach against the existing state-of-the-art methods. Our results demonstrate that the proposed GWO-based client selection outperforms these baselines across various metrics. Specifically, our approach achieves a notable reduction in model loss, accelerates convergence time, and enhances energy efficiency while maintaining high fairness and reliability indicators.
MARCA: Mamba Accelerator with ReConfigurable Architecture
Authors: Jinhao Li, Shan Huang, Jiaming Xu, Jun Liu, Li Ding, Ningyi Xu, Guohao Dai
Date: 2024-09-16 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Mamba, Management

We propose a Mamba accelerator with reconfigurable architecture, MARCA.We propose three novel approaches in this paper. (1) Reduction alternative PE array architecture for both linear and element-wise operations. For linear operations, the reduction tree connected to PE arrays is enabled and executes the reduction operation. For element-wise operations, the reduction tree is disabled and the output bypasses. (2) Reusable nonlinear function unit based on the reconfigurable PE. We decompose the exponential function into element-wise operations and a shift operation by a fast biased exponential algorithm, and the activation function (SiLU) into a range detection and element-wise operations by a piecewise approximation algorithm. Thus, the reconfigurable PEs are reused to execute nonlinear functions with negligible accuracy loss.(3) Intra-operation and inter-operation buffer management strategy. We propose intra-operation buffer management strategy to maximize input data sharing for linear operations within operations, and inter-operation strategy for element-wise operations between operations. We conduct extensive experiments on Mamba model families with different sizes.MARCA achieves up to 463.22$\times$/11.66$\times$ speedup and up to 9761.42$\times$/242.52$\times$ energy efficiency compared to Intel Xeon 8358P CPU and NVIDIA Tesla A100 GPU implementations, respectively.
A hybrid solution for 2-UAV RAN slicing
Authors: Nathan Boyer
Date: 2024-09-15 00:00:00

It's possible to distribute the Internet to users via drones. However it is then necessary to place the drones according to the positions of the users. Moreover, the 5th Generation (5G) New Radio (NR) technology is designed to accommodate a wide range of applications and industries. The NGNM 5G White Paper \cite{5gwhitepaper} groups these vertical use cases into three categories: - enhanced Mobile Broadband (eMBB) - massive Machine Type Communication (mMTC) - Ultra-Reliable Low-latency Communication (URLLC). Partitioning the physical network into multiple virtual networks appears to be the best way to provide a customised service for each application and limit operational costs. This design is well known as \textit{network slicing}. Each drone must thus slice its bandwidth between each of the 3 user classes. This whole problem (placement + bandwidth) can be defined as an optimization problem, but since it is very hard to solve efficiently, it is almost always addressed by AI in the litterature. In my internship, I wanted to prove that viewing the problem as an optimization problem can still be useful, by building an hybrid solution involving on one hand AI and on the other optimization. I use it to achieve better results than approaches that use only AI, although at the cost of slightly larger (but still reasonable) computation times.
Bundle Adjustment in the Eager Mode
Authors: Zitong Zhan, Huan Xu, Zihang Fang, Xinpeng Wei, Yaoyu Hu, Chen Wang
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, GPU, Simultaneous Localization and Mapping

Bundle adjustment (BA) is a critical technique in various robotic applications, such as simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM), augmented reality (AR), and photogrammetry. BA optimizes parameters such as camera poses and 3D landmarks to align them with observations. With the growing importance of deep learning in perception systems, there is an increasing need to integrate BA with deep learning frameworks for enhanced reliability and performance. However, widely-used C++-based BA frameworks, such as GTSAM, g$^2$o, and Ceres, lack native integration with modern deep learning libraries like PyTorch. This limitation affects their flexibility, adaptability, ease of debugging, and overall implementation efficiency. To address this gap, we introduce an eager-mode BA framework seamlessly integrated with PyPose, providing PyTorch-compatible interfaces with high efficiency. Our approach includes GPU-accelerated, differentiable, and sparse operations designed for 2nd-order optimization, Lie group and Lie algebra operations, and linear solvers. Our eager-mode BA on GPU demonstrates substantial runtime efficiency, achieving an average speedup of 18.5$\times$, 22$\times$, and 23$\times$ compared to GTSAM, g$^2$o, and Ceres, respectively.
Massively Multi-Person 3D Human Motion Forecasting with Scene Context
Authors: Felix B Mueller, Julian Tanke, Juergen Gall
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Denoising, Diversity, Motion Forecasting

Forecasting long-term 3D human motion is challenging: the stochasticity of human behavior makes it hard to generate realistic human motion from the input sequence alone. Information on the scene environment and the motion of nearby people can greatly aid the generation process. We propose a scene-aware social transformer model (SAST) to forecast long-term (10s) human motion motion. Unlike previous models, our approach can model interactions between both widely varying numbers of people and objects in a scene. We combine a temporal convolutional encoder-decoder architecture with a Transformer-based bottleneck that allows us to efficiently combine motion and scene information. We model the conditional motion distribution using denoising diffusion models. We benchmark our approach on the Humans in Kitchens dataset, which contains 1 to 16 persons and 29 to 50 objects that are visible simultaneously. Our model outperforms other approaches in terms of realism and diversity on different metrics and in a user study. Code is available at https://github.com/felixbmuller/SAST.
Precise Forecasting of Sky Images Using Spatial Warping
Authors: Leron Julian, Aswin C. Sankaranarayanan
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00

The intermittency of solar power, due to occlusion from cloud cover, is one of the key factors inhibiting its widespread use in both commercial and residential settings. Hence, real-time forecasting of solar irradiance for grid-connected photovoltaic systems is necessary to schedule and allocate resources across the grid. Ground-based imagers that capture wide field-of-view images of the sky are commonly used to monitor cloud movement around a particular site in an effort to forecast solar irradiance. However, these wide FOV imagers capture a distorted image of sky image, where regions near the horizon are heavily compressed. This hinders the ability to precisely predict cloud motion near the horizon which especially affects prediction over longer time horizons. In this work, we combat the aforementioned constraint by introducing a deep learning method to predict a future sky image frame with higher resolution than previous methods. Our main contribution is to derive an optimal warping method to counter the adverse affects of clouds at the horizon, and learn a framework for future sky image prediction which better determines cloud evolution for longer time horizons.
JEAN: Joint Expression and Audio-guided NeRF-based Talking Face Generation
Authors: Sai Tanmay Reddy Chakkera, Aggelina Chatziagapi, Dimitris Samaras
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Face Generation, NeRF, Talking Face Generation

We introduce a novel method for joint expression and audio-guided talking face generation. Recent approaches either struggle to preserve the speaker identity or fail to produce faithful facial expressions. To address these challenges, we propose a NeRF-based network. Since we train our network on monocular videos without any ground truth, it is essential to learn disentangled representations for audio and expression. We first learn audio features in a self-supervised manner, given utterances from multiple subjects. By incorporating a contrastive learning technique, we ensure that the learned audio features are aligned to the lip motion and disentangled from the muscle motion of the rest of the face. We then devise a transformer-based architecture that learns expression features, capturing long-range facial expressions and disentangling them from the speech-specific mouth movements. Through quantitative and qualitative evaluation, we demonstrate that our method can synthesize high-fidelity talking face videos, achieving state-of-the-art facial expression transfer along with lip synchronization to unseen audio.
Autopet III challenge: Incorporating anatomical knowledge into nnUNet for lesion segmentation in PET/CT
Authors: Hamza Kalisch, Fabian Hörst, Ken Herrmann, Jens Kleesiek, Constantin Seibold
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Lesion Segmentation, Segmentation

Lesion segmentation in PET/CT imaging is essential for precise tumor characterization, which supports personalized treatment planning and enhances diagnostic precision in oncology. However, accurate manual segmentation of lesions is time-consuming and prone to inter-observer variability. Given the rising demand and clinical use of PET/CT, automated segmentation methods, particularly deep-learning-based approaches, have become increasingly more relevant. The autoPET III Challenge focuses on advancing automated segmentation of tumor lesions in PET/CT images in a multitracer multicenter setting, addressing the clinical need for quantitative, robust, and generalizable solutions. Building on previous challenges, the third iteration of the autoPET challenge introduces a more diverse dataset featuring two different tracers (FDG and PSMA) from two clinical centers. To this extent, we developed a classifier that identifies the tracer of the given PET/CT based on the Maximum Intensity Projection of the PET scan. We trained two individual nnUNet-ensembles for each tracer where anatomical labels are included as a multi-label task to enhance the model's performance. Our final submission achieves cross-validation Dice scores of 76.90% and 61.33% for the publicly available FDG and PSMA datasets, respectively. The code is available at https://github.com/hakal104/autoPETIII/ .
MoRAG -- Multi-Fusion Retrieval Augmented Generation for Human Motion
Authors: Sai Shashank Kalakonda, Shubh Maheshwari, Ravi Kiran Sarvadevabhatla
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Generation, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

We introduce MoRAG, a novel multi-part fusion based retrieval-augmented generation strategy for text-based human motion generation. The method enhances motion diffusion models by leveraging additional knowledge obtained through an improved motion retrieval process. By effectively prompting large language models (LLMs), we address spelling errors and rephrasing issues in motion retrieval. Our approach utilizes a multi-part retrieval strategy to improve the generalizability of motion retrieval across the language space. We create diverse samples through the spatial composition of the retrieved motions. Furthermore, by utilizing low-level, part-specific motion information, we can construct motion samples for unseen text descriptions. Our experiments demonstrate that our framework can serve as a plug-and-play module, improving the performance of motion diffusion models. Code, pretrained models and sample videos are available at: https://motion-rag.github.io/
Optimal Visual Search with Highly Heuristic Decision Rules
Authors: Anqi Zhang, Wilson S. Geisler
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00

Visual search is a fundamental natural task for humans and other animals. We investigated the decision processes humans use in covert (single-fixation) search with briefly presented displays having well-separated potential target locations. Performance was compared with the Bayesian-optimal decision process under the assumption that the information from the different potential target locations is statistically independent. Surprisingly, humans performed slightly better than optimal, despite humans' substantial loss of sensitivity in the fovea (foveal neglect), and the implausibility of the human brain replicating the optimal computations. We show that three factors can quantitatively explain these seemingly paradoxical results. Most importantly, simple and fixed heuristic decision rules reach near optimal search performance. Secondly, foveal neglect primarily affects only the central potential target location. Finally, spatially correlated neural noise can cause search performance to exceed that predicted for independent noise. These findings have broad implications for understanding visual search tasks and other identification tasks in humans and other animals.
Applications of Knowledge Distillation in Remote Sensing: A Survey
Authors: Yassine Himeur, Nour Aburaed, Omar Elharrouss, Iraklis Varlamis, Shadi Atalla, Wathiq Mansoor, Hussain Al Ahmad
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Instance Segmentation, Knowledge Distillation, Model Compression, object-detection, Object Detection, Semantic Segmentation, Survey

With the ever-growing complexity of models in the field of remote sensing (RS), there is an increasing demand for solutions that balance model accuracy with computational efficiency. Knowledge distillation (KD) has emerged as a powerful tool to meet this need, enabling the transfer of knowledge from large, complex models to smaller, more efficient ones without significant loss in performance. This review article provides an extensive examination of KD and its innovative applications in RS. KD, a technique developed to transfer knowledge from a complex, often cumbersome model (teacher) to a more compact and efficient model (student), has seen significant evolution and application across various domains. Initially, we introduce the fundamental concepts and historical progression of KD methods. The advantages of employing KD are highlighted, particularly in terms of model compression, enhanced computational efficiency, and improved performance, which are pivotal for practical deployments in RS scenarios. The article provides a comprehensive taxonomy of KD techniques, where each category is critically analyzed to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the alternative options, and illustrates specific case studies that showcase the practical implementation of KD methods in RS tasks, such as instance segmentation and object detection. Further, the review discusses the challenges and limitations of KD in RS, including practical constraints and prospective future directions, providing a comprehensive overview for researchers and practitioners in the field of RS. Through this organization, the paper not only elucidates the current state of research in KD but also sets the stage for future research opportunities, thereby contributing significantly to both academic research and real-world applications.
SPRMamba: Surgical Phase Recognition for Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection with Mamba
Authors: Xiangning Zhang, Qingwei Zhang, Jinnan Chen, Chengfeng Zhou, Yaqi Wang, Zhengjie Zhang, Xiaobo Li, Dahong Qian
Date: 2024-09-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Mamba, Surgical phase recognition

Endoscopic Submucosal Dissection (ESD) is a minimally invasive procedure initially developed for early gastric cancer treatment and has expanded to address diverse gastrointestinal lesions. While computer-assisted surgery (CAS) systems enhance ESD precision and safety, their efficacy hinges on accurate real-time surgical phase recognition, a task complicated by ESD's inherent complexity, including heterogeneous lesion characteristics and dynamic tissue interactions. Existing video-based phase recognition algorithms, constrained by inefficient temporal context modeling, exhibit limited performance in capturing fine-grained phase transitions and long-range dependencies. To overcome these limitations, we propose SPRMamba, a novel framework integrating a Mamba-based architecture with a Scaled Residual TranMamba (SRTM) block to synergize long-term temporal modeling and localized detail extraction. SPRMamba further introduces the Hierarchical Sampling Strategy to optimize computational efficiency, enabling real-time processing critical for clinical deployment. Evaluated on the ESD385 dataset and the cholecystectomy benchmark Cholec80, SPRMamba achieves state-of-the-art performance (87.64% accuracy on ESD385, +1.0% over prior methods), demonstrating robust generalizability across surgical workflows. This advancement bridges the gap between computational efficiency and temporal sensitivity, offering a transformative tool for intraoperative guidance and skill assessment in ESD surgery. The code is accessible at https://github.com/Zxnyyyyy/SPRMamba.