pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LASP: Surveying the State-of-the-Art in Large Language Model-Assisted AI Planning
Authors: Haoming Li, Zhaoliang Chen, Jonathan Zhang, Fei Liu
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Scheduling

Effective planning is essential for the success of any task, from organizing a vacation to routing autonomous vehicles and developing corporate strategies. It involves setting goals, formulating plans, and allocating resources to achieve them. LLMs are particularly well-suited for automated planning due to their strong capabilities in commonsense reasoning. They can deduce a sequence of actions needed to achieve a goal from a given state and identify an effective course of action. However, it is frequently observed that plans generated through direct prompting often fail upon execution. Our survey aims to highlight the existing challenges in planning with language models, focusing on key areas such as embodied environments, optimal scheduling, competitive and cooperative games, task decomposition, reasoning, and planning. Through this study, we explore how LLMs transform AI planning and provide unique insights into the future of LM-assisted planning.
Training on the Benchmark Is Not All You Need
Authors: Shiwen Ni, Xiangtao Kong, Chengming Li, Xiping Hu, Ruifeng Xu, Jia Zhu, Min Yang
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Multiple-choice

The success of Large Language Models (LLMs) relies heavily on the huge amount of pre-training data learned in the pre-training phase. The opacity of the pre-training process and the training data causes the results of many benchmark tests to become unreliable. If any model has been trained on a benchmark test set, it can seriously hinder the health of the field. In order to automate and efficiently test the capabilities of large language models, numerous mainstream benchmarks adopt a multiple-choice format. As the swapping of the contents of multiple-choice options does not affect the meaning of the question itself, we propose a simple and effective data leakage detection method based on this property. Specifically, we shuffle the contents of the options in the data to generate the corresponding derived data sets, and then detect data leakage based on the model's log probability distribution over the derived data sets. If there is a maximum and outlier in the set of log probabilities, it indicates that the data is leaked. Our method is able to work under black-box conditions without access to model training data or weights, effectively identifying data leakage from benchmark test sets in model pre-training data, including both normal scenarios and complex scenarios where options may have been shuffled intentionally or unintentionally. Through experiments based on two LLMs and benchmark designs, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method. In addition, we evaluate the degree of data leakage of 31 mainstream open-source LLMs on four benchmark datasets and give a ranking of the leaked LLMs for each benchmark, and we find that the Qwen family of LLMs has the highest degree of data leakage.
Empirical evidence of Large Language Model's influence on human spoken communication
Authors: Hiromu Yakura, Ezequiel Lopez-Lopez, Levin Brinkmann, Ignacio Serna, Prateek Gupta, Iyad Rahwan
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Artificial Intelligence (AI) agents now interact with billions of humans in natural language, thanks to advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT. This raises the question of whether AI has the potential to shape a fundamental aspect of human culture: the way we speak. Recent analyses revealed that scientific publications already exhibit evidence of AI-specific language. But this evidence is inconclusive, since scientists may simply be using AI to copy-edit their writing. To explore whether AI has influenced human spoken communication, we transcribed and analyzed about 280,000 English-language videos of presentations, talks, and speeches from more than 20,000 YouTube channels of academic institutions. We find a significant shift in the trend of word usage specific to words distinctively associated with ChatGPT following its release. These findings provide the first empirical evidence that humans increasingly imitate LLMs in their spoken language. Our results raise societal and policy-relevant concerns about the potential of AI to unintentionally reduce linguistic diversity, or to be deliberately misused for mass manipulation. They also highlight the need for further investigation into the feedback loops between machine behavior and human culture.
Optimal Power Grid Operations with Foundation Models
Authors: Alban Puech, Jonas Weiss, Thomas Brunschwiler, Hendrik F. Hamann
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00

The energy transition, crucial for tackling the climate crisis, demands integrating numerous distributed, renewable energy sources into existing grids. Along with climate change and consumer behavioral changes, this leads to changes and variability in generation and load patterns, introducing significant complexity and uncertainty into grid planning and operations. While the industry has already started to exploit AI to overcome computational challenges of established grid simulation tools, we propose the use of AI Foundation Models (FMs) and advances in Graph Neural Networks to efficiently exploit poorly available grid data for different downstream tasks, enhancing grid operations. For capturing the grid's underlying physics, we believe that building a self-supervised model learning the power flow dynamics is a critical first step towards developing an FM for the power grid. We show how this approach may close the gap between the industry needs and current grid analysis capabilities, to bring the industry closer to optimal grid operation and planning.
Interpreting Outliers in Time Series Data through Decoding Autoencoder
Authors: Patrick Knab, Sascha Marton, Christian Bartelt, Robert Fuder
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Outlier Detection, Outlier Interpretation, Time Series

Outlier detection is a crucial analytical tool in various fields. In critical systems like manufacturing, malfunctioning outlier detection can be costly and safety-critical. Therefore, there is a significant need for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) when deploying opaque models in such environments. This study focuses on manufacturing time series data from a German automotive supply industry. We utilize autoencoders to compress the entire time series and then apply anomaly detection techniques to its latent features. For outlier interpretation, we (i) adopt widely used XAI techniques to the autoencoder's encoder. Additionally, (ii) we propose AEE, Aggregated Explanatory Ensemble, a novel approach that fuses explanations of multiple XAI techniques into a single, more expressive interpretation. For evaluation of explanations, (iii) we propose a technique to measure the quality of encoder explanations quantitatively. Furthermore, we qualitatively assess the effectiveness of outlier explanations with domain expertise.
USTC-KXDIGIT System Description for ASVspoof5 Challenge
Authors: Yihao Chen, Haochen Wu, Nan Jiang, Xiang Xia, Qing Gu, Yunqi Hao, Pengfei Cai, Yu Guan, Jialong Wang, Weilin Xie, Lei Fang, Sian Fang, Yan Song, Wu Guo, Lin Liu, Minqiang Xu
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Face Swapping, Speaker Verification, Voice Conversion

This paper describes the USTC-KXDIGIT system submitted to the ASVspoof5 Challenge for Track 1 (speech deepfake detection) and Track 2 (spoofing-robust automatic speaker verification, SASV). Track 1 showcases a diverse range of technical qualities from potential processing algorithms and includes both open and closed conditions. For these conditions, our system consists of a cascade of a frontend feature extractor and a back-end classifier. We focus on extensive embedding engineering and enhancing the generalization of the back-end classifier model. Specifically, the embedding engineering is based on hand-crafted features and speech representations from a self-supervised model, used for closed and open conditions, respectively. To detect spoof attacks under various adversarial conditions, we trained multiple systems on an augmented training set. Additionally, we used voice conversion technology to synthesize fake audio from genuine audio in the training set to enrich the synthesis algorithms. To leverage the complementary information learned by different model architectures, we employed activation ensemble and fused scores from different systems to obtain the final decision score for spoof detection. During the evaluation phase, the proposed methods achieved 0.3948 minDCF and 14.33% EER in the close condition, and 0.0750 minDCF and 2.59% EER in the open condition, demonstrating the robustness of our submitted systems under adversarial conditions. In Track 2, we continued using the CM system from Track 1 and fused it with a CNN-based ASV system. This approach achieved 0.2814 min-aDCF in the closed condition and 0.0756 min-aDCF in the open condition, showcasing superior performance in the SASV system.
Differentially Private Kernel Density Estimation
Authors: Erzhi Liu, Jerry Yao-Chieh Hu, Alex Reneau, Zhao Song, Han Liu
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Density Estimation

We introduce a refined differentially private (DP) data structure for kernel density estimation (KDE), offering not only improved privacy-utility tradeoff but also better efficiency over prior results. Specifically, we study the mathematical problem: given a similarity function $f$ (or DP KDE) and a private dataset $X \subset \mathbb{R}^d$, our goal is to preprocess $X$ so that for any query $y\in\mathbb{R}^d$, we approximate $\sum_{x \in X} f(x, y)$ in a differentially private fashion. The best previous algorithm for $f(x,y) =\| x - y \|_1$ is the node-contaminated balanced binary tree by [Backurs, Lin, Mahabadi, Silwal, and Tarnawski, ICLR 2024]. Their algorithm requires $O(nd)$ space and time for preprocessing with $n=|X|$. For any query point, the query time is $d \log n$, with an error guarantee of $(1+\alpha)$-approximation and $\epsilon^{-1} \alpha^{-0.5} d^{1.5} R \log^{1.5} n$. In this paper, we improve the best previous result [Backurs, Lin, Mahabadi, Silwal, and Tarnawski, ICLR 2024] in three aspects: - We reduce query time by a factor of $\alpha^{-1} \log n$. - We improve the approximation ratio from $\alpha$ to 1. - We reduce the error dependence by a factor of $\alpha^{-0.5}$. From a technical perspective, our method of constructing the search tree differs from previous work [Backurs, Lin, Mahabadi, Silwal, and Tarnawski, ICLR 2024]. In prior work, for each query, the answer is split into $\alpha^{-1} \log n$ numbers, each derived from the summation of $\log n$ values in interval tree countings. In contrast, we construct the tree differently, splitting the answer into $\log n$ numbers, where each is a smart combination of two distance values, two counting values, and $y$ itself. We believe our tree structure may be of independent interest.
Adaptive Explicit Knowledge Transfer for Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Hyungkeun Park, Jong-Seok Lee
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Transfer Learning

Logit-based knowledge distillation (KD) for classification is cost-efficient compared to feature-based KD but often subject to inferior performance. Recently, it was shown that the performance of logit-based KD can be improved by effectively delivering the probability distribution for the non-target classes from the teacher model, which is known as `implicit (dark) knowledge', to the student model. Through gradient analysis, we first show that this actually has an effect of adaptively controlling the learning of implicit knowledge. Then, we propose a new loss that enables the student to learn explicit knowledge (i.e., the teacher's confidence about the target class) along with implicit knowledge in an adaptive manner. Furthermore, we propose to separate the classification and distillation tasks for effective distillation and inter-class relationship modeling. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method, called adaptive explicit knowledge transfer (AEKT) method, achieves improved performance compared to the state-of-the-art KD methods on the CIFAR-100 and ImageNet datasets.
Classifier-Free Diffusion-Based Weakly-Supervised Approach for Health Indicator Derivation in Rotating Machines: Advancing Early Fault Detection and Condition Monitoring
Authors: Wenyang Hu, Gaetan Frusque, Tianyang Wang, Fulei Chu, Olga Fink
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection

Deriving health indicators of rotating machines is crucial for their maintenance. However, this process is challenging for the prevalent adopted intelligent methods since they may take the whole data distributions, not only introducing noise interference but also lacking the explainability. To address these issues, we propose a diffusion-based weakly-supervised approach for deriving health indicators of rotating machines, enabling early fault detection and continuous monitoring of condition evolution. This approach relies on a classifier-free diffusion model trained using healthy samples and a few anomalies. This model generates healthy samples. and by comparing the differences between the original samples and the generated ones in the envelope spectrum, we construct an anomaly map that clearly identifies faults. Health indicators are then derived, which can explain the fault types and mitigate noise interference. Comparative studies on two cases demonstrate that the proposed method offers superior health monitoring effectiveness and robustness compared to baseline models.
A Multimodal Object-level Contrast Learning Method for Cancer Survival Risk Prediction
Authors: Zekang Yang, Hong Liu, Xiangdong Wang
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Computer-aided cancer survival risk prediction plays an important role in the timely treatment of patients. This is a challenging weakly supervised ordinal regression task associated with multiple clinical factors involved such as pathological images, genomic data and etc. In this paper, we propose a new training method, multimodal object-level contrast learning, for cancer survival risk prediction. First, we construct contrast learning pairs based on the survival risk relationship among the samples in the training sample set. Then we introduce the object-level contrast learning method to train the survival risk predictor. We further extend it to the multimodal scenario by applying cross-modal constrast. Considering the heterogeneity of pathological images and genomics data, we construct a multimodal survival risk predictor employing attention-based and self-normalizing based nerural network respectively. Finally, the survival risk predictor trained by our proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art methods on two public multimodal cancer datasets for survival risk prediction.
Enhancing Fine-Grained Visual Recognition in the Low-Data Regime Through Feature Magnitude Regularization
Authors: Avraham Chapman, HaiMing Xu, Lingqiao Liu
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Recognition, Fine-Grained Visual Recognition, image-classification, Image Classification

Training a fine-grained image recognition model with limited data presents a significant challenge, as the subtle differences between categories may not be easily discernible amidst distracting noise patterns. One commonly employed strategy is to leverage pretrained neural networks, which can generate effective feature representations for constructing an image classification model with a restricted dataset. However, these pretrained neural networks are typically trained for different tasks than the fine-grained visual recognition (FGVR) task at hand, which can lead to the extraction of less relevant features. Moreover, in the context of building FGVR models with limited data, these irrelevant features can dominate the training process, overshadowing more useful, generalizable discriminative features. Our research has identified a surprisingly simple solution to this challenge: we introduce a regularization technique to ensure that the magnitudes of the extracted features are evenly distributed. This regularization is achieved by maximizing the uniformity of feature magnitude distribution, measured through the entropy of the normalized features. The motivation behind this regularization is to remove bias in feature magnitudes from pretrained models, where some features may be more prominent and, consequently, more likely to be used for classification. Additionally, we have developed a dynamic weighting mechanism to adjust the strength of this regularization throughout the learning process. Despite its apparent simplicity, our approach has demonstrated significant performance improvements across various fine-grained visual recognition datasets.
Pureformer-VC: Non-parallel One-Shot Voice Conversion with Pure Transformer Blocks and Triplet Discriminative Training
Authors: Wenhan Yao, Zedong Xing, Xiarun Chen, Jia Liu, Yongqiang He, Weiping Wen
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Disentanglement, Style Transfer, Triplet, Voice Conversion

One-shot voice conversion(VC) aims to change the timbre of any source speech to match that of the target speaker with only one speech sample. Existing style transfer-based VC methods relied on speech representation disentanglement and suffered from accurately and independently encoding each speech component and recomposing back to converted speech effectively. To tackle this, we proposed Pureformer-VC, which utilizes Conformer blocks to build a disentangled encoder, and Zipformer blocks to build a style transfer decoder as the generator. In the decoder, we used effective styleformer blocks to integrate speaker characteristics effectively into the generated speech. The models used the generative VAE loss for encoding components and triplet loss for unsupervised discriminative training. We applied the styleformer method to Zipformer's shared weights for style transfer. The experimental results show that the proposed model achieves comparable subjective scores and exhibits improvements in objective metrics compared to existing methods in a one-shot voice conversion scenario.
ReKep: Spatio-Temporal Reasoning of Relational Keypoint Constraints for Robotic Manipulation
Authors: Wenlong Huang, Chen Wang, Yunzhu Li, Ruohan Zhang, Li Fei-Fei
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00

Representing robotic manipulation tasks as constraints that associate the robot and the environment is a promising way to encode desired robot behaviors. However, it remains unclear how to formulate the constraints such that they are 1) versatile to diverse tasks, 2) free of manual labeling, and 3) optimizable by off-the-shelf solvers to produce robot actions in real-time. In this work, we introduce Relational Keypoint Constraints (ReKep), a visually-grounded representation for constraints in robotic manipulation. Specifically, ReKep is expressed as Python functions mapping a set of 3D keypoints in the environment to a numerical cost. We demonstrate that by representing a manipulation task as a sequence of Relational Keypoint Constraints, we can employ a hierarchical optimization procedure to solve for robot actions (represented by a sequence of end-effector poses in SE(3)) with a perception-action loop at a real-time frequency. Furthermore, in order to circumvent the need for manual specification of ReKep for each new task, we devise an automated procedure that leverages large vision models and vision-language models to produce ReKep from free-form language instructions and RGB-D observations. We present system implementations on a wheeled single-arm platform and a stationary dual-arm platform that can perform a large variety of manipulation tasks, featuring multi-stage, in-the-wild, bimanual, and reactive behaviors, all without task-specific data or environment models. Website at https://rekep-robot.github.io/.
PMLBmini: A Tabular Classification Benchmark Suite for Data-Scarce Applications
Authors: Ricardo Knauer, Marvin Grimm, Erik Rodner
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: AutoML, Binary Classification, Deep Learning, tabular-classification

In practice, we are often faced with small-sized tabular data. However, current tabular benchmarks are not geared towards data-scarce applications, making it very difficult to derive meaningful conclusions from empirical comparisons. We introduce PMLBmini, a tabular benchmark suite of 44 binary classification datasets with sample sizes $\leq$ 500. We use our suite to thoroughly evaluate current automated machine learning (AutoML) frameworks, off-the-shelf tabular deep neural networks, as well as classical linear models in the low-data regime. Our analysis reveals that state-of-the-art AutoML and deep learning approaches often fail to appreciably outperform even a simple logistic regression baseline, but we also identify scenarios where AutoML and deep learning methods are indeed reasonable to apply. Our benchmark suite, available on https://github.com/RicardoKnauer/TabMini , allows researchers and practitioners to analyze their own methods and challenge their data efficiency.
Dreaming is All You Need
Authors: Mingze Ni, Wei Liu
Date: 2024-09-03 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Decoder

In classification tasks, achieving a harmonious balance between exploration and precision is of paramount importance. To this end, this research introduces two novel deep learning models, SleepNet and DreamNet, to strike this balance. SleepNet seamlessly integrates supervised learning with unsupervised ``sleep" stages using pre-trained encoder models. Dedicated neurons within SleepNet are embedded in these unsupervised features, forming intermittent ``sleep" blocks that facilitate exploratory learning. Building upon the foundation of SleepNet, DreamNet employs full encoder-decoder frameworks to reconstruct the hidden states, mimicking the human "dreaming" process. This reconstruction process enables further exploration and refinement of the learned representations. Moreover, the principle ideas of our SleepNet and DreamNet are generic and can be applied to both computer vision and natural language processing downstream tasks. Through extensive empirical evaluations on diverse image and text datasets, SleepNet and DreanNet have demonstrated superior performance compared to state-of-the-art models, showcasing the strengths of unsupervised exploration and supervised precision afforded by our innovative approaches.