pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Participation in the age of foundation models
Authors: Harini Suresh, Emily Tseng, Meg Young, Mary L. Gray, Emma Pierson, Karen Levy
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00

Growing interest and investment in the capabilities of foundation models has positioned such systems to impact a wide array of public services. Alongside these opportunities is the risk that these systems reify existing power imbalances and cause disproportionate harm to marginalized communities. Participatory approaches hold promise to instead lend agency and decision-making power to marginalized stakeholders. But existing approaches in participatory AI/ML are typically deeply grounded in context - how do we apply these approaches to foundation models, which are, by design, disconnected from context? Our paper interrogates this question. First, we examine existing attempts at incorporating participation into foundation models. We highlight the tension between participation and scale, demonstrating that it is intractable for impacted communities to meaningfully shape a foundation model that is intended to be universally applicable. In response, we develop a blueprint for participatory foundation models that identifies more local, application-oriented opportunities for meaningful participation. In addition to the "foundation" layer, our framework proposes the "subfloor'' layer, in which stakeholders develop shared technical infrastructure, norms and governance for a grounded domain, and the "surface'' layer, in which affected communities shape the use of a foundation model for a specific downstream task. The intermediate "subfloor'' layer scopes the range of potential harms to consider, and affords communities more concrete avenues for deliberation and intervention. At the same time, it avoids duplicative effort by scaling input across relevant use cases. Through three case studies in clinical care, financial services, and journalism, we illustrate how this multi-layer model can create more meaningful opportunities for participation than solely intervening at the foundation layer.
The Data Minimization Principle in Machine Learning
Authors: Prakhar Ganesh, Cuong Tran, Reza Shokri, Ferdinando Fioretto
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00

The principle of data minimization aims to reduce the amount of data collected, processed or retained to minimize the potential for misuse, unauthorized access, or data breaches. Rooted in privacy-by-design principles, data minimization has been endorsed by various global data protection regulations. However, its practical implementation remains a challenge due to the lack of a rigorous formulation. This paper addresses this gap and introduces an optimization framework for data minimization based on its legal definitions. It then adapts several optimization algorithms to perform data minimization and conducts a comprehensive evaluation in terms of their compliance with minimization objectives as well as their impact on user privacy. Our analysis underscores the mismatch between the privacy expectations of data minimization and the actual privacy benefits, emphasizing the need for approaches that account for multiple facets of real-world privacy risks.
Leveraging Generative AI for Urban Digital Twins: A Scoping Review on the Autonomous Generation of Urban Data, Scenarios, Designs, and 3D City Models for Smart City Advancement
Authors: Haowen Xu, Femi Omitaomu, Soheil Sabri, Sisi Zlatanova, Xiao Li, Yongze Song
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Data Augmentation, Management, Survey

The digital transformation of modern cities by integrating advanced information, communication, and computing technologies has marked the epoch of data-driven smart city applications for efficient and sustainable urban management. Despite their effectiveness, these applications often rely on massive amounts of high-dimensional and multi-domain data for monitoring and characterizing different urban sub-systems, presenting challenges in application areas that are limited by data quality and availability, as well as costly efforts for generating urban scenarios and design alternatives. As an emerging research area in deep learning, Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) models have demonstrated their unique values in data and code generation. This survey paper aims to explore the innovative integration of generative AI techniques and urban digital twins to address challenges in the realm of smart cities in various urban sectors, such as transportation and mobility management, energy system operations, building and infrastructure management, and urban design. The survey starts with the introduction of popular generative AI models with their application areas, followed by a structured review of the existing urban science applications that leverage the autonomous capability of the generative AI techniques to facilitate (a) data augmentation for promoting urban monitoring and predictive analytics, (b) synthetic data and scenario generation, (c) automated 3D city modeling, and (d) generative urban design and optimization. Based on the review, this survey discusses potential opportunities and technical strategies that integrate generative AI models into the next-generation urban digital twins for more reliable, scalable, and automated management of smart cities.
MemControl: Mitigating Memorization in Diffusion Models via Automated Parameter Selection
Authors: Raman Dutt, Ondrej Bohdal, Pedro Sanchez, Sotirios A. Tsaftaris, Timothy Hospedales
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Medical Image Generation, Memorization, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Diffusion models excel in generating images that closely resemble their training data but are also susceptible to data memorization, raising privacy, ethical, and legal concerns, particularly in sensitive domains such as medical imaging. We hypothesize that this memorization stems from the overparameterization of deep models and propose that regularizing model capacity during fine-tuning can mitigate this issue. Firstly, we empirically show that regulating the model capacity via Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) mitigates memorization to some extent, however, it further requires the identification of the exact parameter subsets to be fine-tuned for high-quality generation. To identify these subsets, we introduce a bi-level optimization framework, MemControl, that automates parameter selection using memorization and generation quality metrics as rewards during fine-tuning. The parameter subsets discovered through MemControl achieve a superior tradeoff between generation quality and memorization. For the task of medical image generation, our approach outperforms existing state-of-the-art memorization mitigation strategies by fine-tuning as few as 0.019% of model parameters. Moreover, we demonstrate that the discovered parameter subsets are transferable to non-medical domains. Our framework is scalable to large datasets, agnostic to reward functions, and can be integrated with existing approaches for further memorization mitigation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to empirically evaluate memorization in medical images and propose a targeted yet universal mitigation strategy. The code is available at https://github.com/Raman1121/Diffusion_Memorization_HPO
An Automated Startup Evaluation Pipeline: Startup Success Forecasting Framework (SSFF)
Authors: Xisen Wang, Yigit Ihlamur
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00

Evaluating startups in their early stages is a complex task that requires detailed analysis by experts. While automating this process on a large scale can significantly impact businesses, the inherent complexity poses challenges. This paper addresses this challenge by introducing the Startup Success Forecasting Framework (SSFF), a new automated system that combines traditional machine learning with advanced language models. This intelligent agent-based architecture is designed to reason, act, synthesize, and decide like a venture capitalist to perform the analysis end-to-end. The SSFF is made up of three main parts: - Prediction Block: Uses random forests and neural networks to make predictions. - Analyst Block: Simulates VC analysis scenario and uses SOTA prompting techniques - External Knowledge Block: Gathers real-time information from external sources. This framework requires minimal input data about the founder and startup description, enhances it with additional data from external resources, and performs a detailed analysis with high accuracy, all in an automated manner
Optimizing Split Points for Error-Resilient SplitFed Learning
Authors: Chamani Shiranthika, Parvaneh Saeedi, Ivan V. Bajić
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Recent advancements in decentralized learning, such as Federated Learning (FL), Split Learning (SL), and Split Federated Learning (SplitFed), have expanded the potentials of machine learning. SplitFed aims to minimize the computational burden on individual clients in FL and parallelize SL while maintaining privacy. This study investigates the resilience of SplitFed to packet loss at model split points. It explores various parameter aggregation strategies of SplitFed by examining the impact of splitting the model at different points-either shallow split or deep split-on the final global model performance. The experiments, conducted on a human embryo image segmentation task, reveal a statistically significant advantage of a deeper split point.
MathChat: Benchmarking Mathematical Reasoning and Instruction Following in Multi-Turn Interactions
Authors: Zhenwen Liang, Dian Yu, Wenhao Yu, Wenlin Yao, Zhihan Zhang, Xiangliang Zhang, Dong Yu
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Dialogue Understanding, Instruction Following, Math, Mathematical Problem-Solving, Mathematical Question Answering, Mathematical Reasoning, Question Answering

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in mathematical problem solving, particularly in single turn question answering formats. However, real world scenarios often involve mathematical question answering that requires multi turn or interactive information exchanges, and the performance of LLMs on these tasks is still underexplored. This paper introduces MathChat, a comprehensive benchmark specifically designed to evaluate LLMs across a broader spectrum of mathematical tasks. These tasks are structured to assess the models' abilities in multiturn interactions and open ended generation. We evaluate the performance of various SOTA LLMs on the MathChat benchmark, and we observe that while these models excel in single turn question answering, they significantly underperform in more complex scenarios that require sustained reasoning and dialogue understanding. To address the above limitations of existing LLMs when faced with multiturn and open ended tasks, we develop MathChat sync, a synthetic dialogue based math dataset for LLM finetuning, focusing on improving models' interaction and instruction following capabilities in conversations. Experimental results emphasize the need for training LLMs with diverse, conversational instruction tuning datasets like MathChatsync. We believe this work outlines one promising direction for improving the multiturn mathematical reasoning abilities of LLMs, thus pushing forward the development of LLMs that are more adept at interactive mathematical problem solving and real world applications.
Evaluating Vision-Language Models on Bistable Images
Authors: Artemis Panagopoulou, Coby Melkin, Chris Callison-Burch
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00

Bistable images, also known as ambiguous or reversible images, present visual stimuli that can be seen in two distinct interpretations, though not simultaneously by the observer. In this study, we conduct the most extensive examination of vision-language models using bistable images to date. We manually gathered a dataset of 29 bistable images, along with their associated labels, and subjected them to 116 different manipulations in brightness, tint, and rotation. We evaluated twelve different models in both classification and generative tasks across six model architectures. Our findings reveal that, with the exception of models from the Idefics family and LLaVA1.5-13b, there is a pronounced preference for one interpretation over another among the models, and minimal variance under image manipulations, with few exceptions on image rotations. Additionally, we compared the model preferences with humans, noting that the models do not exhibit the same continuity biases as humans and often diverge from human initial interpretations. We also investigated the influence of variations in prompts and the use of synonymous labels, discovering that these factors significantly affect model interpretations more than image manipulations showing a higher influence of the language priors on bistable image interpretations compared to image-text training data. All code and data is open sourced.
Learning Human-Aligned Representations with Contrastive Learning and Generative Similarity
Authors: Raja Marjieh, Sreejan Kumar, Declan Campbell, Liyi Zhang, Gianluca Bencomo, Jake Snell, Thomas L. Griffiths
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Few-Shot Learning

Humans rely on effective representations to learn from few examples and abstract useful information from sensory data. Inducing such representations in machine learning models has been shown to improve their performance on various benchmarks such as few-shot learning and robustness. However, finding effective training procedures to achieve that goal can be challenging as psychologically rich training data such as human similarity judgments are expensive to scale, and Bayesian models of human inductive biases are often intractable for complex, realistic domains. Here, we address this challenge by leveraging a Bayesian notion of generative similarity whereby two data points are considered similar if they are likely to have been sampled from the same distribution. This measure can be applied to complex generative processes, including probabilistic programs. We incorporate generative similarity into a contrastive learning objective to enable learning of embeddings that express human cognitive representations. We demonstrate the utility of our approach by showing that it can be used to capture human-like representations of shape regularity, abstract Euclidean geometric concepts, and semantic hierarchies for natural images.
VisTA-SR: Improving the Accuracy and Resolution of Low-Cost Thermal Imaging Cameras for Agriculture
Authors: Heesup Yun, Sassoum Lo, Christine H. Diepenbrock, Brian N. Bailey, J. Mason Earles
Date: 2024-05-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement

Thermal cameras are an important tool for agricultural research because they allow for non-invasive measurement of plant temperature, which relates to important photochemical, hydraulic, and agronomic traits. Utilizing low-cost thermal cameras can lower the barrier to introducing thermal imaging in agricultural research and production. This paper presents an approach to improve the temperature accuracy and image quality of low-cost thermal imaging cameras for agricultural applications. Leveraging advancements in computer vision techniques, particularly deep learning networks, we propose a method, called $\textbf{VisTA-SR}$ ($\textbf{Vis}$ual \& $\textbf{T}$hermal $\textbf{A}$lignment and $\textbf{S}$uper-$\textbf{R}$esolution Enhancement) that combines RGB and thermal images to enhance the capabilities of low-resolution thermal cameras. The research includes calibration and validation of temperature measurements, acquisition of paired image datasets, and the development of a deep learning network tailored for agricultural thermal imaging. Our study addresses the challenges of image enhancement in the agricultural domain and explores the potential of low-cost thermal cameras to replace high-resolution industrial cameras. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in enhancing temperature accuracy and image sharpness, paving the way for more accessible and efficient thermal imaging solutions in agriculture.
Unique3D: High-Quality and Efficient 3D Mesh Generation from a Single Image
Authors: Kailu Wu, Fangfu Liu, Zhihan Cai, Runjie Yan, HanYang Wang, Yating Hu, Yueqi Duan, Kaisheng Ma
Date: 2024-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image to 3D, Single-View 3D Reconstruction, Single-View 3D Reconstruction on ShapeNet

In this work, we introduce Unique3D, a novel image-to-3D framework for efficiently generating high-quality 3D meshes from single-view images, featuring state-of-the-art generation fidelity and strong generalizability. Previous methods based on Score Distillation Sampling (SDS) can produce diversified 3D results by distilling 3D knowledge from large 2D diffusion models, but they usually suffer from long per-case optimization time with inconsistent issues. Recent works address the problem and generate better 3D results either by finetuning a multi-view diffusion model or training a fast feed-forward model. However, they still lack intricate textures and complex geometries due to inconsistency and limited generated resolution. To simultaneously achieve high fidelity, consistency, and efficiency in single image-to-3D, we propose a novel framework Unique3D that includes a multi-view diffusion model with a corresponding normal diffusion model to generate multi-view images with their normal maps, a multi-level upscale process to progressively improve the resolution of generated orthographic multi-views, as well as an instant and consistent mesh reconstruction algorithm called ISOMER, which fully integrates the color and geometric priors into mesh results. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our Unique3D significantly outperforms other image-to-3D baselines in terms of geometric and textural details.
MotionLLM: Understanding Human Behaviors from Human Motions and Videos
Authors: Ling-Hao Chen, Shunlin Lu, Ailing Zeng, Hao Zhang, Benyou Wang, Ruimao Zhang, Lei Zhang
Date: 2024-05-30 00:00:00

This study delves into the realm of multi-modality (i.e., video and motion modalities) human behavior understanding by leveraging the powerful capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Diverging from recent LLMs designed for video-only or motion-only understanding, we argue that understanding human behavior necessitates joint modeling from both videos and motion sequences (e.g., SMPL sequences) to capture nuanced body part dynamics and semantics effectively. In light of this, we present MotionLLM, a straightforward yet effective framework for human motion understanding, captioning, and reasoning. Specifically, MotionLLM adopts a unified video-motion training strategy that leverages the complementary advantages of existing coarse video-text data and fine-grained motion-text data to glean rich spatial-temporal insights. Furthermore, we collect a substantial dataset, MoVid, comprising diverse videos, motions, captions, and instructions. Additionally, we propose the MoVid-Bench, with carefully manual annotations, for better evaluation of human behavior understanding on video and motion. Extensive experiments show the superiority of MotionLLM in the caption, spatial-temporal comprehension, and reasoning ability.
Visual Perception by Large Language Model's Weights
Authors: Feipeng Ma, Hongwei Xue, Guangting Wang, Yizhou Zhou, Fengyun Rao, Shilin Yan, Yueyi Zhang, Siying Wu, Mike Zheng Shou, Xiaoyan Sun
Date: 2024-05-30 00:00:00

Existing Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) follow the paradigm that perceives visual information by aligning visual features with the input space of Large Language Models (LLMs), and concatenating visual tokens with text tokens to form a unified sequence input for LLMs. These methods demonstrate promising results on various vision-language tasks but are limited by the high computational effort due to the extended input sequence resulting from the involvement of visual tokens. In this paper, instead of input space alignment, we propose a novel parameter space alignment paradigm that represents visual information as model weights. For each input image, we use a vision encoder to extract visual features, convert features into perceptual weights, and merge the perceptual weights with LLM's weights. In this way, the input of LLM does not require visual tokens, which reduces the length of the input sequence and greatly improves efficiency. Following this paradigm, we propose VLoRA with the perceptual weights generator. The perceptual weights generator is designed to convert visual features to perceptual weights with low-rank property, exhibiting a form similar to LoRA. The experimental results show that our VLoRA achieves comparable performance on various benchmarks for MLLMs, while significantly reducing the computational costs for both training and inference. The code and models will be made open-source.
RapVerse: Coherent Vocals and Whole-Body Motions Generations from Text
Authors: Jiaben Chen, Xin Yan, Yihang Chen, Siyuan Cen, Qinwei Ma, Haoyu Zhen, Kaizhi Qian, Lie Lu, Chuang Gan
Date: 2024-05-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Generation

In this work, we introduce a challenging task for simultaneously generating 3D holistic body motions and singing vocals directly from textual lyrics inputs, advancing beyond existing works that typically address these two modalities in isolation. To facilitate this, we first collect the RapVerse dataset, a large dataset containing synchronous rapping vocals, lyrics, and high-quality 3D holistic body meshes. With the RapVerse dataset, we investigate the extent to which scaling autoregressive multimodal transformers across language, audio, and motion can enhance the coherent and realistic generation of vocals and whole-body human motions. For modality unification, a vector-quantized variational autoencoder is employed to encode whole-body motion sequences into discrete motion tokens, while a vocal-to-unit model is leveraged to obtain quantized audio tokens preserving content, prosodic information, and singer identity. By jointly performing transformer modeling on these three modalities in a unified way, our framework ensures a seamless and realistic blend of vocals and human motions. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our unified generation framework not only produces coherent and realistic singing vocals alongside human motions directly from textual inputs but also rivals the performance of specialized single-modality generation systems, establishing new benchmarks for joint vocal-motion generation. The project page is available for research purposes at https://vis-www.cs.umass.edu/RapVerse.
VividDream: Generating 3D Scene with Ambient Dynamics
Authors: Yao-Chih Lee, Yi-Ting Chen, Andrew Wang, Ting-Hsuan Liao, Brandon Y. Feng, Jia-Bin Huang
Date: 2024-05-30 00:00:00

We introduce VividDream, a method for generating explorable 4D scenes with ambient dynamics from a single input image or text prompt. VividDream first expands an input image into a static 3D point cloud through iterative inpainting and geometry merging. An ensemble of animated videos is then generated using video diffusion models with quality refinement techniques and conditioned on renderings of the static 3D scene from the sampled camera trajectories. We then optimize a canonical 4D scene representation using an animated video ensemble, with per-video motion embeddings and visibility masks to mitigate inconsistencies. The resulting 4D scene enables free-view exploration of a 3D scene with plausible ambient scene dynamics. Experiments demonstrate that VividDream can provide human viewers with compelling 4D experiences generated based on diverse real images and text prompts.