pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LAB-Bench: Measuring Capabilities of Language Models for Biology Research
Authors: Jon M. Laurent, Joseph D. Janizek, Michael Ruzo, Michaela M. Hinks, Michael J. Hammerling, Siddharth Narayanan, Manvitha Ponnapati, Andrew D. White, Samuel G. Rodriques
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Multiple-choice, scientific discovery

There is widespread optimism that frontier Large Language Models (LLMs) and LLM-augmented systems have the potential to rapidly accelerate scientific discovery across disciplines. Today, many benchmarks exist to measure LLM knowledge and reasoning on textbook-style science questions, but few if any benchmarks are designed to evaluate language model performance on practical tasks required for scientific research, such as literature search, protocol planning, and data analysis. As a step toward building such benchmarks, we introduce the Language Agent Biology Benchmark (LAB-Bench), a broad dataset of over 2,400 multiple choice questions for evaluating AI systems on a range of practical biology research capabilities, including recall and reasoning over literature, interpretation of figures, access and navigation of databases, and comprehension and manipulation of DNA and protein sequences. Importantly, in contrast to previous scientific benchmarks, we expect that an AI system that can achieve consistently high scores on the more difficult LAB-Bench tasks would serve as a useful assistant for researchers in areas such as literature search and molecular cloning. As an initial assessment of the emergent scientific task capabilities of frontier language models, we measure performance of several against our benchmark and report results compared to human expert biology researchers. We will continue to update and expand LAB-Bench over time, and expect it to serve as a useful tool in the development of automated research systems going forward. A public subset of LAB-Bench is available for use at the following URL: https://huggingface.co/datasets/futurehouse/lab-bench
Evolved Developmental Artificial Neural Networks for Multitasking with Advanced Activity Dependence
Authors: Yintong Zhang, Jason A. Yoder
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00

Recently, Cartesian Genetic Programming has been used to evolve developmental programs to guide the formation of artificial neural networks (ANNs). This approach has demonstrated success in enabling ANNs to perform multiple tasks while avoiding catastrophic forgetting. One unique aspect of this approach is the use of separate developmental programs evolved to regulate the development of separate soma and dendrite units. An opportunity afforded by this approach is the ability to incorporate Activity Dependence (AD) into the model such that environmental feedback can help to regulate the behavior of each type of unit. Previous work has shown a limited version of AD (influencing neural bias) to provide marginal improvements over non-AD ANNs. In this work, we present promising results from new extensions to AD. Specifically, we demonstrate a more significant improvement via AD on new neural parameters including health and position, as well as a combination of all of these along with bias. We report on the implications of this work and suggest several promising directions for future work.
Affordance-Guided Reinforcement Learning via Visual Prompting
Authors: Olivia Y. Lee, Annie Xie, Kuan Fang, Karl Pertsch, Chelsea Finn
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Visual Prompting, Visual Reasoning

Robots equipped with reinforcement learning (RL) have the potential to learn a wide range of skills solely from a reward signal. However, obtaining a robust and dense reward signal for general manipulation tasks remains a challenge. Existing learning-based approaches require significant data, such as human demonstrations of success and failure, to learn task-specific reward functions. Recently, there is also a growing adoption of large multi-modal foundation models for robotics that can perform visual reasoning in physical contexts and generate coarse robot motions for manipulation tasks. Motivated by this range of capability, in this work, we present Keypoint-based Affordance Guidance for Improvements (KAGI), a method leveraging rewards shaped by vision-language models (VLMs) for autonomous RL. State-of-the-art VLMs have demonstrated impressive reasoning about affordances through keypoints in zero-shot, and we use these to define dense rewards that guide autonomous robotic learning. On real-world manipulation tasks specified by natural language descriptions, KAGI improves the sample efficiency of autonomous RL and enables successful task completion in 30K online fine-tuning steps. Additionally, we demonstrate the robustness of KAGI to reductions in the number of in-domain demonstrations used for pre-training, reaching similar performance in 45K online fine-tuning steps. Project website: https://sites.google.com/view/affordance-guided-rl
Mapping the Scholarship of Dark Pattern Regulation: A Systematic Review of Concepts, Regulatory Paradigms, and Solutions from an Interdisciplinary Perspective
Authors: Weiwei Yi, Zihao Li
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00

Dark patterns, design tricks used on online interfaces to manipulate users decision-making process, have raised public concerns. However, research on regulation of dark pattern remains underdeveloped and scattered, particularly regarding scholars views on the concept, regulatory paradigms, and solutions. Following PRISMA guidelines, this paper systematically reviews the formats and content of regulatory discussions on dark patterns from the interdisciplinary scholarship of Law and Human-Computer Interaction. A total of 65 studies were analysed through content and thematic analysis. This study synthesises the unique trends and characteristics of legal scholarship on dark patterns, identifying five root problems and triple layered harms. It critiques current regulations in terms of legal theories and sectoral legislations, highlighting their inadequacies in addressing dark patterns. The paper also critically examines existing proposed solutions, including paradigmatic shifts in legal doctrines, refinements to existing frameworks, technical design-embedded solutions, and accountability measures for design practices. This research critically discusses the current barriers to effective dark pattern regulations and explores promising regulatory solutions. The difficulty in identifying the normative nature of various forms of dark patterns, in identifying evident and actionable harm, and the expanding scope of dark patterns connotation inherently hinders effective regulation. However, technical design-embedded solutions, accountability frameworks, and practical design guidelines offer potential routes for more proactive regulation, while legal pluralism stands as a promising macro-level change in regulatory paradigms for dark pattern regulation.
Towards Adapting Reinforcement Learning Agents to New Tasks: Insights from Q-Values
Authors: Ashwin Ramaswamy, Ransalu Senanayake
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Policy Gradient Methods, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

While contemporary reinforcement learning research and applications have embraced policy gradient methods as the panacea of solving learning problems, value-based methods can still be useful in many domains as long as we can wrangle with how to exploit them in a sample efficient way. In this paper, we explore the chaotic nature of DQNs in reinforcement learning, while understanding how the information that they retain when trained can be repurposed for adapting a model to different tasks. We start by designing a simple experiment in which we are able to observe the Q-values for each state and action in an environment. Then we train in eight different ways to explore how these training algorithms affect the way that accurate Q-values are learned (or not learned). We tested the adaptability of each trained model when retrained to accomplish a slightly modified task. We then scaled our setup to test the larger problem of an autonomous vehicle at an unprotected intersection. We observed that the model is able to adapt to new tasks quicker when the base model's Q-value estimates are closer to the true Q-values. The results provide some insights and guidelines into what algorithms are useful for sample efficient task adaptation.
The Interpretation Gap in Text-to-Music Generation Models
Authors: Yongyi Zang, Yixiao Zhang
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Music Generation, Music Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Text-to-Music Generation

Large-scale text-to-music generation models have significantly enhanced music creation capabilities, offering unprecedented creative freedom. However, their ability to collaborate effectively with human musicians remains limited. In this paper, we propose a framework to describe the musical interaction process, which includes expression, interpretation, and execution of controls. Following this framework, we argue that the primary gap between existing text-to-music models and musicians lies in the interpretation stage, where models lack the ability to interpret controls from musicians. We also propose two strategies to address this gap and call on the music information retrieval community to tackle the interpretation challenge to improve human-AI musical collaboration.
Learning Unlabeled Clients Divergence for Federated Semi-Supervised Learning via Anchor Model Aggregation
Authors: Marawan Elbatel, Hualiang Wang, Jixiang Chen, Hao Wang, Xiaomeng Li
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00

Federated semi-supervised learning (FedSemi) refers to scenarios where there may be clients with fully labeled data, clients with partially labeled, and even fully unlabeled clients while preserving data privacy. However, challenges arise from client drift due to undefined heterogeneous class distributions and erroneous pseudo-labels. Existing FedSemi methods typically fail to aggregate models from unlabeled clients due to their inherent unreliability, thus overlooking unique information from their heterogeneous data distribution, leading to sub-optimal results. In this paper, we enable unlabeled client aggregation through SemiAnAgg, a novel Semi-supervised Anchor-Based federated Aggregation. SemiAnAgg learns unlabeled client contributions via an anchor model, effectively harnessing their informative value. Our key idea is that by feeding local client data to the same global model and the same consistently initialized anchor model (i.e., random model), we can measure the importance of each unlabeled client accordingly. Extensive experiments demonstrate that SemiAnAgg achieves new state-of-the-art results on four widely used FedSemi benchmarks, leading to substantial performance improvements: a 9% increase in accuracy on CIFAR-100 and a 7.6% improvement in recall on the medical dataset ISIC-18, compared with prior state-of-the-art. Code is available at: https://github.com/xmed-lab/SemiAnAgg.
AlphaDou: High-Performance End-to-End Doudizhu AI Integrating Bidding
Authors: Chang Lei, Huan Lei
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Card Games

Artificial intelligence for card games has long been a popular topic in AI research. In recent years, complex card games like Mahjong and Texas Hold'em have been solved, with corresponding AI programs reaching the level of human experts. However, the game of Doudizhu presents significant challenges due to its vast state/action space and unique characteristics involving reasoning about competition and cooperation, making the game extremely difficult to solve.The RL model Douzero, trained using the Deep Monte Carlo algorithm framework, has shown excellent performance in Doudizhu. However, there are differences between its simplified game environment and the actual Doudizhu environment, and its performance is still a considerable distance from that of human experts. This paper modifies the Deep Monte Carlo algorithm framework by using reinforcement learning to obtain a neural network that simultaneously estimates win rates and expectations. The action space is pruned using expectations, and strategies are generated based on win rates. The modified algorithm enables the AI to perform the full range of tasks in the Doudizhu game, including bidding and cardplay. The model was trained in a actual Doudizhu environment and achieved state-of-the-art performance among publicly available models. We hope that this new framework will provide valuable insights for AI development in other bidding-based games.
Disrupting Diffusion-based Inpainters with Semantic Digression
Authors: Geonho Son, Juhun Lee, Simon S. Woo
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Misinformation

The fabrication of visual misinformation on the web and social media has increased exponentially with the advent of foundational text-to-image diffusion models. Namely, Stable Diffusion inpainters allow the synthesis of maliciously inpainted images of personal and private figures, and copyrighted contents, also known as deepfakes. To combat such generations, a disruption framework, namely Photoguard, has been proposed, where it adds adversarial noise to the context image to disrupt their inpainting synthesis. While their framework suggested a diffusion-friendly approach, the disruption is not sufficiently strong and it requires a significant amount of GPU and time to immunize the context image. In our work, we re-examine both the minimal and favorable conditions for a successful inpainting disruption, proposing DDD, a "Digression guided Diffusion Disruption" framework. First, we identify the most adversarially vulnerable diffusion timestep range with respect to the hidden space. Within this scope of noised manifold, we pose the problem as a semantic digression optimization. We maximize the distance between the inpainting instance's hidden states and a semantic-aware hidden state centroid, calibrated both by Monte Carlo sampling of hidden states and a discretely projected optimization in the token space. Effectively, our approach achieves stronger disruption and a higher success rate than Photoguard while lowering the GPU memory requirement, and speeding the optimization up to three times faster.
Cross-Lingual Multi-Hop Knowledge Editing -- Benchmarks, Analysis and a Simple Contrastive Learning based Approach
Authors: Aditi Khandelwal, Harman Singh, Hengrui Gu, Tianlong Chen, Kaixiong Zhou
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, knowledge editing

Large language models are often expected to constantly adapt to new sources of knowledge and knowledge editing techniques aim to efficiently patch the outdated model knowledge, with minimal modification. Most prior works focus on monolingual knowledge editing in English, even though new information can emerge in any language from any part of the world. We propose the Cross-Lingual Multi-Hop Knowledge Editing paradigm, for measuring and analyzing the performance of various SoTA knowledge editing techniques in a cross-lingual setup. Specifically, we create a parallel cross-lingual benchmark, CROLIN-MQUAKE for measuring the knowledge editing capabilities. Our extensive analysis over various knowledge editing techniques uncover significant gaps in performance between the cross-lingual and English-centric setting. Following this, we propose a significantly improved system for cross-lingual multi-hop knowledge editing, CLEVER-CKE. CLEVER-CKE is based on a retrieve, verify and generate knowledge editing framework, where a retriever is formulated to recall edited facts and support an LLM to adhere to knowledge edits. We develop language-aware and hard-negative based contrastive objectives for improving the cross-lingual and fine-grained fact retrieval and verification process used in this framework. Extensive experiments on three LLMs, eight languages, and two datasets show CLEVER-CKE's significant gains of up to 30% over prior methods.
Visual Prompt Selection for In-Context Learning Segmentation
Authors: Wei Suo, Lanqing Lai, Mengyang Sun, Hanwang Zhang, Peng Wang, Yanning Zhang
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Image Segmentation, In-Context Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

As a fundamental and extensively studied task in computer vision, image segmentation aims to locate and identify different semantic concepts at the pixel level. Recently, inspired by In-Context Learning (ICL), several generalist segmentation frameworks have been proposed, providing a promising paradigm for segmenting specific objects. However, existing works mostly ignore the value of visual prompts or simply apply similarity sorting to select contextual examples. In this paper, we focus on rethinking and improving the example selection strategy. By comprehensive comparisons, we first demonstrate that ICL-based segmentation models are sensitive to different contexts. Furthermore, empirical evidence indicates that the diversity of contextual prompts plays a crucial role in guiding segmentation. Based on the above insights, we propose a new stepwise context search method. Different from previous works, we construct a small yet rich candidate pool and adaptively search the well-matched contexts. More importantly, this method effectively reduces the annotation cost by compacting the search space. Extensive experiments show that our method is an effective strategy for selecting examples and enhancing segmentation performance.
Learning to Steer Markovian Agents under Model Uncertainty
Authors: Jiawei Huang, Vinzenz Thoma, Zebang Shen, Heinrich H. Nax, Niao He
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Designing incentives for an adapting population is a ubiquitous problem in a wide array of economic applications and beyond. In this work, we study how to design additional rewards to steer multi-agent systems towards desired policies \emph{without} prior knowledge of the agents' underlying learning dynamics. Motivated by the limitation of existing works, we consider a new and general category of learning dynamics called \emph{Markovian agents}. We introduce a model-based non-episodic Reinforcement Learning (RL) formulation for our steering problem. Importantly, we focus on learning a \emph{history-dependent} steering strategy to handle the inherent model uncertainty about the agents' learning dynamics. We introduce a novel objective function to encode the desiderata of achieving a good steering outcome with reasonable cost. Theoretically, we identify conditions for the existence of steering strategies to guide agents to the desired policies. Complementing our theoretical contributions, we provide empirical algorithms to approximately solve our objective, which effectively tackles the challenge in learning history-dependent strategies. We demonstrate the efficacy of our algorithms through empirical evaluations.
Dominant Design Prediction with Phylogenetic Networks
Authors: Youwei He, Jeong-Dong Lee, Dawoon Jeong, Sungjun Choi, Jiyong Kim
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

This study proposes an effective method to predict technology development from an evolutionary perspective. Product evolution is the result of technological evolution and market selection. A phylogenetic network is the main method to study product evolution. The formation of the dominant design determines the trajectory of technology development. How to predict future dominant design has become a key issue in technology forecasting and new product development. We define the dominant product and use machine learning methods, combined with product evolutionary theory, to construct a Fully Connected Phylogenetic Network dataset to effectively predict the future dominant design.
Shape2Scene: 3D Scene Representation Learning Through Pre-training on Shape Data
Authors: Tuo Feng, Wenguan Wang, Ruijie Quan, Yi Yang
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, 3D Semantic Segmentation, object-detection, Object Detection, Representation Learning, Scene Understanding, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Current 3D self-supervised learning methods of 3D scenes face a data desert issue, resulting from the time-consuming and expensive collecting process of 3D scene data. Conversely, 3D shape datasets are easier to collect. Despite this, existing pre-training strategies on shape data offer limited potential for 3D scene understanding due to significant disparities in point quantities. To tackle these challenges, we propose Shape2Scene (S2S), a novel method that learns representations of large-scale 3D scenes from 3D shape data. We first design multiscale and high-resolution backbones for shape and scene level 3D tasks, i.e., MH-P (point-based) and MH-V (voxel-based). MH-P/V establishes direct paths to highresolution features that capture deep semantic information across multiple scales. This pivotal nature makes them suitable for a wide range of 3D downstream tasks that tightly rely on high-resolution features. We then employ a Shape-to-Scene strategy (S2SS) to amalgamate points from various shapes, creating a random pseudo scene (comprising multiple objects) for training data, mitigating disparities between shapes and scenes. Finally, a point-point contrastive loss (PPC) is applied for the pre-training of MH-P/V. In PPC, the inherent correspondence (i.e., point pairs) is naturally obtained in S2SS. Extensive experiments have demonstrated the transferability of 3D representations learned by MH-P/V across shape-level and scene-level 3D tasks. MH-P achieves notable performance on well-known point cloud datasets (93.8% OA on ScanObjectNN and 87.6% instance mIoU on ShapeNetPart). MH-V also achieves promising performance in 3D semantic segmentation and 3D object detection.
A3S: A General Active Clustering Method with Pairwise Constraints
Authors: Xun Deng, Junlong Liu, Han Zhong, Fuli Feng, Chen Shen, Xiangnan He, Jieping Ye, Zheng Wang
Date: 2024-07-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

Active clustering aims to boost the clustering performance by integrating human-annotated pairwise constraints through strategic querying. Conventional approaches with semi-supervised clustering schemes encounter high query costs when applied to large datasets with numerous classes. To address these limitations, we propose a novel Adaptive Active Aggregation and Splitting (A3S) framework, falling within the cluster-adjustment scheme in active clustering. A3S features strategic active clustering adjustment on the initial cluster result, which is obtained by an adaptive clustering algorithm. In particular, our cluster adjustment is inspired by the quantitative analysis of Normalized mutual information gain under the information theory framework and can provably improve the clustering quality. The proposed A3S framework significantly elevates the performance and scalability of active clustering. In extensive experiments across diverse real-world datasets, A3S achieves desired results with significantly fewer human queries compared with existing methods.