pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Leveraging Blockchain and ANFIS for Optimal Supply Chain Management
Authors: Amirfarhad Farhadi, Homayoun Safarpour Motealegh Mahalegi, Abolfazl Pourrezaeian Firouzabad, Azadeh Zamanifar, Majid Sorouri
Date: 2024-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The supply chain is a critical segment of the product manufacturing cycle, continuously influenced by risky, uncertain, and undesirable events. Optimizing flexibility in the supply chain presents a complex, multi-objective, and nonlinear programming challenge. In the poultry supply chain, the development of mass customization capabilities has led manufacturing companies to increasingly focus on offering tailored and customized services for individual products. To safeguard against data tampering and ensure the integrity of setup costs and overall profitability, a multi-signature decentralized finance (DeFi) protocol, integrated with the IoT on a blockchain platform, is proposed. Managing the poultry supply chain involves uncertainties that may not account for parameters such as delivery time to retailers, reorder time, and the number of requested products. To address these challenges, this study employs an adaptive neuro-fuzzy inference system (ANFIS), combining neural networks with fuzzy logic to compensate for the lack of data training in parameter identification. Through MATLAB simulations, the study investigates the average shop delivery duration, the reorder time, and the number of products per order. By implementing the proposed technique, the average delivery time decreases from 40 to 37 minutes, the reorder time decreases from five to four days, and the quantity of items requested per order grows from six to eleven. Additionally, the ANFIS model enhances overall supply chain performance by reducing transaction times by 15\% compared to conventional systems, thereby improving real-time responsiveness and boosting transparency in supply chain operations, effectively resolving operational issues.
Advance Real-time Detection of Traffic Incidents in Highways using Vehicle Trajectory Data
Authors: Sudipta Roy, Samiul Hasan
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00

A significant number of traffic crashes are secondary crashes that occur because of an earlier incident on the road. Thus, early detection of traffic incidents is crucial for road users from safety perspectives with a potential to reduce the risk of secondary crashes. The wide availability of GPS devices now-a-days gives an opportunity of tracking and recording vehicle trajectories. The objective of this study is to use vehicle trajectory data for advance real-time detection of traffic incidents on highways using machine learning-based algorithms. The study uses three days of unevenly sequenced vehicle trajectory data and traffic incident data on I-10, one of the most crash-prone highways in Louisiana. Vehicle trajectories are converted to trajectories based on virtual detector locations to maintain spatial uniformity as well as to generate historical traffic data for machine learning algorithms. Trips matched with traffic incidents on the way are separated and along with other trips with similar spatial attributes are used to build a database for modeling. Multiple machine learning algorithms such as Logistic Regression, Random Forest, Extreme Gradient Boost, and Artificial Neural Network models are used to detect a trajectory that is likely to face an incident in the downstream road section. Results suggest that the Random Forest model achieves the best performance for predicting an incident with reasonable recall value and discrimination capability.
iCPS-DL: A Description Language for Autonomic Industrial Cyber-Physical Systems
Authors: Dimitrios Kouzapas, Christos G. Panayiotou, Demetrios G. Eliades
Date: 2024-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

Modern industrial systems require frequent updates to their cyber and physical infrastructures, often demanding considerable reconfiguration effort. This paper introduces the industrial Cyber-Physical Systems Description Language, iCPS-DL, which enables autonomic reconfigurations for industrial Cyber-Physical Systems. The iCPS-DL maps an industrial process using semantics for physical and cyber-physical components, a state estimation model, and agent interactions. A novel aspect is using communication semantics to ensure live interaction among distributed agents. Reasoning on the semantic description facilitates the configuration of the industrial process control loop. A Water Distribution Networks domain case study demonstrates iCPS-DL's application.
The Future of Open Human Feedback
Authors: Shachar Don-Yehiya, Ben Burtenshaw, Ramon Fernandez Astudillo, Cailean Osborne, Mimansa Jaiswal, Tzu-Sheng Kuo, Wenting Zhao, Idan Shenfeld, Andi Peng, Mikhail Yurochkin, Atoosa Kasirzadeh, Yangsibo Huang, Tatsunori Hashimoto, Yacine Jernite, Daniel Vila-Suero, Omri Abend, Jennifer Ding, Sara Hooker, Hannah Rose Kirk, Leshem Choshen
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00

Human feedback on conversations with language language models (LLMs) is central to how these systems learn about the world, improve their capabilities, and are steered toward desirable and safe behaviors. However, this feedback is mostly collected by frontier AI labs and kept behind closed doors. In this work, we bring together interdisciplinary experts to assess the opportunities and challenges to realizing an open ecosystem of human feedback for AI. We first look for successful practices in peer production, open source, and citizen science communities. We then characterize the main challenges for open human feedback. For each, we survey current approaches and offer recommendations. We end by envisioning the components needed to underpin a sustainable and open human feedback ecosystem. In the center of this ecosystem are mutually beneficial feedback loops, between users and specialized models, incentivizing a diverse stakeholders community of model trainers and feedback providers to support a general open feedback pool.
GPT-4 Emulates Average-Human Emotional Cognition from a Third-Person Perspective
Authors: Ala N. Tak, Jonathan Gratch
Date: 2024-08-11 00:00:00

This paper extends recent investigations on the emotional reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Current research on LLMs has not directly evaluated the distinction between how LLMs predict the self-attribution of emotions and the perception of others' emotions. We first look at carefully crafted emotion-evoking stimuli, originally designed to find patterns of brain neural activity representing fine-grained inferred emotional attributions of others. We show that GPT-4 is especially accurate in reasoning about such stimuli. This suggests LLMs agree with humans' attributions of others' emotions in stereotypical scenarios remarkably more than self-attributions of emotions in idiosyncratic situations. To further explore this, our second study utilizes a dataset containing annotations from both the author and a third-person perspective. We find that GPT-4's interpretations align more closely with human judgments about the emotions of others than with self-assessments. Notably, conventional computational models of emotion primarily rely on self-reported ground truth as the gold standard. However, an average observer's standpoint, which LLMs appear to have adopted, might be more relevant for many downstream applications, at least in the absence of individual information and adequate safety considerations.
Civiverse: A Dataset for Analyzing User Engagement with Open-Source Text-to-Image Models
Authors: Maria-Teresa De Rosa Palmini, Laura Wagner, Eva Cetinic
Date: 2024-08-10 00:00:00

Text-to-image (TTI) systems, particularly those utilizing open-source frameworks, have become increasingly prevalent in the production of Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated visuals. While existing literature has explored various problematic aspects of TTI technologies, such as bias in generated content, intellectual property concerns, and the reinforcement of harmful stereotypes, open-source TTI frameworks have not yet been systematically examined from a cultural perspective. This study addresses this gap by analyzing the CivitAI platform, a leading open-source platform dedicated to TTI AI. We introduce the Civiverse prompt dataset, encompassing millions of images and related metadata. We focus on prompt analysis, specifically examining the semantic characteristics of text prompts, as it is crucial for addressing societal issues related to generative technologies. This analysis provides insights into user intentions, preferences, and behaviors, which in turn shape the outputs of these models. Our findings reveal a predominant preference for generating explicit content, along with a focus on homogenization of semantic content. These insights underscore the need for further research into the perpetuation of misogyny, harmful stereotypes, and the uniformity of visual culture within these models.
AI-Powered Camera and Sensors for the Rehabilitation Hand Exoskeleton
Authors: Md Abdul Baset Sarker, Juan Pablo Sola-thomas, Masudul H. Imtiaz
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00

Due to Motor Neurone Diseases, a large population remains disabled worldwide, negatively impacting their independence and quality of life. This typically involves a weakness in the hand and forearm muscles, making it difficult to perform fine motor tasks such as writing, buttoning a shirt, or gripping objects. This project presents a vision-enabled rehabilitation hand exoskeleton to assist disabled persons in their hand movements. The design goal was to create an accessible tool to help with a simple interface requiring no training. This prototype is built on a commercially available glove where a camera and embedded processor were integrated to help open and close the hand, using air pressure, thus grabbing an object. An accelerometer is also implemented to detect the characteristic hand gesture to release the object when desired. This passive vision-based control differs from active EMG-based designs as it does not require individualized training. Continuing the research will reduce the cost, weight, and power consumption to facilitate mass implementation.
AutoGen Studio: A No-Code Developer Tool for Building and Debugging Multi-Agent Systems
Authors: Victor Dibia, Jingya Chen, Gagan Bansal, Suff Syed, Adam Fourney, Erkang Zhu, Chi Wang, Saleema Amershi
Date: 2024-08-09 00:00:00

Multi-agent systems, where multiple agents (generative AI models + tools) collaborate, are emerging as an effective pattern for solving long-running, complex tasks in numerous domains. However, specifying their parameters (such as models, tools, and orchestration mechanisms etc,.) and debugging them remains challenging for most developers. To address this challenge, we present AUTOGEN STUDIO, a no-code developer tool for rapidly prototyping, debugging, and evaluating multi-agent workflows built upon the AUTOGEN framework. AUTOGEN STUDIO offers a web interface and a Python API for representing LLM-enabled agents using a declarative (JSON-based) specification. It provides an intuitive drag-and-drop UI for agent workflow specification, interactive evaluation and debugging of workflows, and a gallery of reusable agent components. We highlight four design principles for no-code multi-agent developer tools and contribute an open-source implementation at https://github.com/microsoft/autogen/tree/main/samples/apps/autogen-studio
AltCanvas: A Tile-Based Image Editor with Generative AI for Blind or Visually Impaired People
Authors: Seonghee Lee, Maho Kohga, Steve Landau, Sile O'Modhrain, Hari Subramonyam
Date: 2024-08-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

People with visual impairments often struggle to create content that relies heavily on visual elements, particularly when conveying spatial and structural information. Existing accessible drawing tools, which construct images line by line, are suitable for simple tasks like math but not for more expressive artwork. On the other hand, emerging generative AI-based text-to-image tools can produce expressive illustrations from descriptions in natural language, but they lack precise control over image composition and properties. To address this gap, our work integrates generative AI with a constructive approach that provides users with enhanced control and editing capabilities. Our system, AltCanvas, features a tile-based interface enabling users to construct visual scenes incrementally, with each tile representing an object within the scene. Users can add, edit, move, and arrange objects while receiving speech and audio feedback. Once completed, the scene can be rendered as a color illustration or as a vector for tactile graphic generation. Involving 14 blind or low-vision users in design and evaluation, we found that participants effectively used the AltCanvas workflow to create illustrations.
Multi-Source EEG Emotion Recognition via Dynamic Contrastive Domain Adaptation
Authors: Yun Xiao, Yimeng Zhang, Xiaopeng Peng, Shuzheng Han, Xia Zheng, Dingyi Fang, Xiaojiang Chen
Date: 2024-08-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, EEG, EEG Emotion Recognition, Emotion Recognition

Electroencephalography (EEG) provides reliable indications of human cognition and mental states. Accurate emotion recognition from EEG remains challenging due to signal variations among individuals and across measurement sessions. We introduce a multi-source dynamic contrastive domain adaptation method (MS-DCDA) based on differential entropy (DE) features, in which coarse-grained inter-domain and fine-grained intra-class adaptations are modeled through a multi-branch contrastive neural network and contrastive sub-domain discrepancy learning. Leveraging domain knowledge from each individual source and a complementary source ensemble, our model uses dynamically weighted learning to achieve an optimal tradeoff between domain transferability and discriminability. The proposed MS-DCDA model was evaluated using the SEED and SEED-IV datasets, achieving respectively the highest mean accuracies of $90.84\%$ and $78.49\%$ in cross-subject experiments as well as $95.82\%$ and $82.25\%$ in cross-session experiments. Our model outperforms several alternative domain adaptation methods in recognition accuracy, inter-class margin, and intra-class compactness. Our study also suggests greater emotional sensitivity in the frontal and parietal brain lobes, providing insights for mental health interventions, personalized medicine, and preventive strategies.
Inductive Learning of Logical Theories with LLMs: An Expressivity-Graded Analysis
Authors: João Pedro Gandarela, Danilo S. Carvalho, André Freitas
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Learning, Inductive logic programming

This work presents a novel systematic methodology to analyse the capabilities and limitations of Large Language Models (LLMs) with feedback from a formal inference engine, on logic theory induction. The analysis is complexity-graded w.r.t. rule dependency structure, allowing quantification of specific inference challenges on LLM performance. Integrating LLMs with formal methods is a promising frontier in the Natural Language Processing field, as an important avenue for improving model inference control and explainability. In particular, inductive learning over complex sets of facts and rules, poses unique challenges for current autoregressive models, as they lack explicit symbolic grounding. While they can be complemented by formal systems, the properties delivered by LLMs regarding inductive learning, are not well understood and quantified. Empirical results indicate that the largest LLMs can achieve competitive results against a SOTA Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) system baseline, but also that tracking long predicate relationship chains is a more difficult obstacle than theory complexity for LLMs.
Particle Flows for Source Localization in 3-D Using TDOA Measurements
Authors: Wenyu Zhang, Mohammad Javad Khojasteh, Florian Meyer
Date: 2024-08-30 00:00:00

Localization using time-difference of arrival (TDOA) has myriad applications, e.g., in passive surveillance systems and marine mammal research. In this paper, we present a Bayesian estimation method that can localize an unknown number of static sources in 3-D based on TDOA measurements. The proposed localization algorithm based on particle flow (PFL) can overcome the challenges related to the highly nonlinear TDOA measurement model, the data association (DA) uncertainty, and the uncertainty in the number of sources to be localized. Different PFL strategies are compared within a unified belief propagation (BP) framework in a challenging multisensor source localization problem. In particular, we consider PFL-based approximation of beliefs based on one or multiple Gaussian kernels with parameters computed using deterministic and stochastic flow processes. Our numerical results demonstrate that the proposed method can correctly determine the number of sources and provide accurate location estimates. The stochastic flow demonstrates greater accuracy compared to the deterministic flow when using the same number of particles.
Recursive Attentive Pooling for Extracting Speaker Embeddings from Multi-Speaker Recordings
Authors: Shota Horiguchi, Atsushi Ando, Takafumi Moriya, Takanori Ashihara, Hiroshi Sato, Naohiro Tawara, Marc Delcroix
Date: 2024-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: speaker-diarization, Speaker Diarization, Speaker Recognition, Speaker Verification

This paper proposes a method for extracting speaker embedding for each speaker from a variable-length recording containing multiple speakers. Speaker embeddings are crucial not only for speaker recognition but also for various multi-speaker speech applications such as speaker diarization and target-speaker speech processing. Despite the challenges of obtaining a single speaker's speech without pre-registration in multi-speaker scenarios, most studies on speaker embedding extraction focus on extracting embeddings only from single-speaker recordings. Some methods have been proposed for extracting speaker embeddings directly from multi-speaker recordings, but they typically require preparing a model for each possible number of speakers or involve complicated training procedures. The proposed method computes the embeddings of multiple speakers by focusing on different parts of the frame-wise embeddings extracted from the input multi-speaker audio. This is achieved by recursively computing attention weights for pooling the frame-wise embeddings. Additionally, we propose using the calculated attention weights to estimate the number of speakers in the recording, which allows the same model to be applied to various numbers of speakers. Experimental evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in speaker verification and diarization tasks.
Personalized Voice Synthesis through Human-in-the-Loop Coordinate Descent
Authors: Yusheng Tian, Junbin Liu, Tan Lee
Date: 2024-08-30 00:00:00

This paper describes a human-in-the-loop approach to personalized voice synthesis in the absence of reference speech data from the target speaker. It is intended to help vocally disabled individuals restore their lost voices without requiring any prior recordings. The proposed approach leverages a learned speaker embedding space. Starting from an initial voice, users iteratively refine the speaker embedding parameters through a coordinate descent-like process, guided by auditory perception. By analyzing the latent space, it is noted that that the embedding parameters correspond to perceptual voice attributes, including pitch, vocal tension, brightness, and nasality, making the search process intuitive. Computer simulations and real-world user studies demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective in approximating target voices across a diverse range of test cases.
Robust Model Predictive Control Exploiting Monotonicity Properties
Authors: Moritz Heinlein, Sankaranarayanan Subramanian, Sergio Lucia
Date: 2024-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Model Predictive Control

Robust model predictive control algorithms are essential for addressing unavoidable errors due to the uncertainty in predicting real-world systems. However, the formulation of such algorithms typically results in a trade-off between conservatism and computational complexity. Monotone systems facilitate the efficient computation of reachable sets and thus the straightforward formulation of a robust model predictive control approach optimizing over open-loop predictions. We present an approach based on the division of reachable sets to incorporate feedback in the predictions, resulting in less conservative strategies. The concept of mixed-monotonicity enables an extension of our methodology to non-monotone systems. The potential of the proposed approaches is demonstrated through a nonlinear high-dimensional chemical tank reactor cascade case study.
Filtering in Projection-based Integrators for Improved Phase Characteristics
Authors: Hoang Chu, S. J. A. M van den Eijnden, M. F. Heertjes, W. P. M. H. Heemels
Date: 2024-08-30 00:00:00

Projection-based integrators are effectively employed in high-precision systems with growing industrial success. By utilizing a projection operator, the resulting projection-based integrator keeps its input-output pair within a designated sector set, leading to unique freedom in control design that can be directly translated into performance benefits. This paper aims to enhance projection-based integrators by incorporating well-crafted linear filters into its structure, resulting in a new class of projected integrators that includes the earlier ones, such as the hybrid-integrator gain systems (with and without pre-filtering) as special cases. The extra design freedom in the form of two filters in the input paths to the projection operator and the internal dynamics allows the controller to break away from the inherent limitations of the linear control design. The enhanced performance properties of the proposed structure are formally demonstrated through a (quasi-linear) describing function analysis, the absence of the gain-loss problem, and numerical case studies showcasing improved time-domain properties. The describing function analysis is supported by rigorously showing incremental properties of the new filtered projection-based integrators thereby guaranteeing that the computed steady-state responses are unique and asymptotically stable.
Efficient Dual-Band Single-Port Rectifier for RF Energy Harvesting at FM and GSM Bands
Authors: Nastouh Nikkhah, Rasool Keshavarz, Mehran Abolhasan, Justin Lipman, Negin Shariati
Date: 2024-08-30 00:00:00

This paper presents an efficient dual-band rectifier for radiofrequency energy harvesting (RFEH) applications at FM and GSM bands. The single-port rectifier circuit, which comprises a 3-port network, optimized T-matching circuits and voltage doubler, is designed, simulated and fabricated to obtain a high RF-to-DC power conversion efficiency (PCE). Measurement results show PCE of 26% and 22% at -20 dBm, and also 58% and 51% at -10 dBm with a maximum amount of 69% and 65% at -2.5 dBm and -5 dBm, with single tone at 95 and 925 MHz, respectively. Besides, the fractional bandwidth of 21% at FM and 11% at GSM band is achieved. The measurement and simulation results are in good agreement. Consequently, the proposed rectifier can be a potential candidate for ambient RF energy harvesting and wireless power transfer (WPT). It should be noted that a 3-port network as a duplexer is designed to be integrated with single-port antennas which cover both FM and GSM bands as a low-cost solution. Moreover, based on simulation results, PCE has small variations when the load resistor varies from 10 to 18 k$\Omega$. Therefore, this rectifier can be utilized for any desired resistance within the range, such as sensors and IoT devices.