pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MIMNet: Multi-Interest Meta Network with Multi-Granularity Target-Guided Attention for Cross-domain Recommendation
Authors: Xiaofei Zhu, Yabo Yin, Li Wang
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Cross-domain recommendation (CDR) plays a critical role in alleviating the sparsity and cold-start problem and substantially boosting the performance of recommender systems. Existing CDR methods prefer to either learn a common preference bridge shared by all users or a personalized preference bridge tailored for each user to transfer user preference from the source domain to the target domain. Although these methods significantly improve the recommendation performance, there are still some limitations. First, these methods usually assume a user only has a unique interest, while ignoring the fact that a user may interact with items with different interest preferences. Second, they learn transformed preference representation mainly relies on the source domain signals, while neglecting the rich information available in the target domain. To handle these issues, in this paper, we propose a novel method named Multi-interest Meta Network with Multi-granularity Target-guided Attention (MIMNet) for cross-domain recommendation. To be specific, we employ the capsule network to learn user multiple interests in the source domain, which will be fed into a meta network to generate multiple interest-level preference bridges. Then, we transfer user representations from the source domain to the target domain based on these multi-interest bridges. In addition, we introduce both fine-grained and coarse-grained target signals to aggregate user transformed interest-level representations by incorporating a novel multi-granularity target-guided attention network. We conduct extensive experimental results on three real-world CDR tasks, and the results show that our proposed approach MIMNet consistently outperforms all baseline methods. The source code of MIMNet is released at https://github.com/marqu22/MIMNet.
Semantic Codebook Learning for Dynamic Recommendation Models
Authors: Zheqi Lv, Shaoxuan He, Tianyu Zhan, Shengyu Zhang, Wenqiao Zhang, Jingyuan Chen, Zhou Zhao, Fei Wu
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Sequential Recommendation

Dynamic sequential recommendation (DSR) can generate model parameters based on user behavior to improve the personalization of sequential recommendation under various user preferences. However, it faces the challenges of large parameter search space and sparse and noisy user-item interactions, which reduces the applicability of the generated model parameters. The Semantic Codebook Learning for Dynamic Recommendation Models (SOLID) framework presents a significant advancement in DSR by effectively tackling these challenges. By transforming item sequences into semantic sequences and employing a dual parameter model, SOLID compresses the parameter generation search space and leverages homogeneity within the recommendation system. The introduction of the semantic metacode and semantic codebook, which stores disentangled item representations, ensures robust and accurate parameter generation. Extensive experiments demonstrates that SOLID consistently outperforms existing DSR, delivering more accurate, stable, and robust recommendations.
Simple but Efficient: A Multi-Scenario Nearline Retrieval Framework for Recommendation on Taobao
Authors: Yingcai Ma, Ziyang Wang, Yuliang Yan, Jian Wu, Yuning Jiang, Longbin Li, Wen Chen, Jianhang Huang
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems, Retrieval

In recommendation systems, the matching stage is becoming increasingly critical, serving as the upper limit for the entire recommendation process. Recently, some studies have started to explore the use of multi-scenario information for recommendations, such as model-based and data-based approaches. However, the matching stage faces significant challenges due to the need for ultra-large-scale retrieval and meeting low latency requirements. As a result, the methods applied at this stage (collaborative filtering and two-tower models) are often designed to be lightweight, hindering the full utilization of extensive information. On the other hand, the ranking stage features the most sophisticated models with the strongest scoring capabilities, but due to the limited screen size of mobile devices, most of the ranked results may not gain exposure or be displayed. In this paper, we introduce an innovative multi-scenario nearline retrieval framework. It operates by harnessing ranking logs from various scenarios through Flink, allowing us to incorporate finely ranked results from other scenarios into our matching stage in near real-time. Besides, we propose a streaming scoring module, which selects a crucial subset from the candidate pool. Implemented on the "Guess You Like" (homepage of the Taobao APP), China's premier e-commerce platform, our method has shown substantial improvements-most notably, a 5% uptick in product transactions. Furthermore, the proposed approach is not only model-free but also highly efficient, suggesting it can be quickly implemented in diverse scenarios and demonstrate promising performance.
RDP: Ranked Differential Privacy for Facial Feature Protection in Multiscale Sparsified Subspace
Authors: Lu Ou, Shaolin Liao, Shihui Gao, Guandong Huang, Zheng Qi
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Recognition

With the widespread sharing of personal face images in applications' public databases, face recognition systems faces real threat of being breached by potential adversaries who are able to access users' face images and use them to intrude the face recognition systems. In this paper, we propose a novel privacy protection method in the multiscale sparsified feature subspaces to protect sensitive facial features, by taking care of the influence or weight ranked feature coefficients on the privacy budget, named "Ranked Differential Privacy (RDP)". After the multiscale feature decomposition, the lightweight Laplacian noise is added to the dimension-reduced sparsified feature coefficients according to the geometric superposition method. Then, we rigorously prove that the RDP satisfies Differential Privacy. After that, the nonlinear Lagrange Multiplier (LM) method is formulated for the constraint optimization problem of maximizing the utility of the visualization quality protected face images with sanitizing noise, under a given facial features privacy budget. Then, two methods are proposed to solve the nonlinear LM problem and obtain the optimal noise scale parameters: 1) the analytical Normalization Approximation (NA) method with identical average noise scale parameter for real-time online applications; and 2) the LM optimization Gradient Descent (LMGD) numerical method to obtain the nonlinear solution through iterative updating for more accurate offline applications. Experimental results on two real-world datasets show that our proposed RDP outperforms other state-of-the-art methods: at a privacy budget of 0.2, the PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of the RDP is about ~10 dB higher than (10 times as high as) the highest PSNR of all compared methods.
Leveraging Weak Cross-Modal Guidance for Coherence Modelling via Iterative Learning
Authors: Yi Bin, Junrong Liao, Yujuan Ding, Haoxuan Li, Yang Yang, See-Kiong Ng, Heng Tao Shen
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00

Cross-modal coherence modeling is essential for intelligent systems to help them organize and structure information, thereby understanding and creating content of the physical world coherently like human-beings. Previous work on cross-modal coherence modeling attempted to leverage the order information from another modality to assist the coherence recovering of the target modality. Despite of the effectiveness, labeled associated coherency information is not always available and might be costly to acquire, making the cross-modal guidance hard to leverage. To tackle this challenge, this paper explores a new way to take advantage of cross-modal guidance without gold labels on coherency, and proposes the Weak Cross-Modal Guided Ordering (WeGO) model. More specifically, it leverages high-confidence predicted pairwise order in one modality as reference information to guide the coherence modeling in another. An iterative learning paradigm is further designed to jointly optimize the coherence modeling in two modalities with selected guidance from each other. The iterative cross-modal boosting also functions in inference to further enhance coherence prediction in each modality. Experimental results on two public datasets have demonstrated that the proposed method outperforms existing methods for cross-modal coherence modeling tasks. Major technical modules have been evaluated effective through ablation studies. Codes are available at: \url{https://github.com/scvready123/IterWeGO}.
DistillGrasp: Integrating Features Correlation with Knowledge Distillation for Depth Completion of Transparent Objects
Authors: Yiheng Huang, Junhong Chen, Nick Michiels, Muhammad Asim, Luc Claesen, Wenyin Liu
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Completion, Feature Correlation, Knowledge Distillation, Robotic Grasping, Transparent objects

Due to the visual properties of reflection and refraction, RGB-D cameras cannot accurately capture the depth of transparent objects, leading to incomplete depth maps. To fill in the missing points, recent studies tend to explore new visual features and design complex networks to reconstruct the depth, however, these approaches tremendously increase computation, and the correlation of different visual features remains a problem. To this end, we propose an efficient depth completion network named DistillGrasp which distillates knowledge from the teacher branch to the student branch. Specifically, in the teacher branch, we design a position correlation block (PCB) that leverages RGB images as the query and key to search for the corresponding values, guiding the model to establish correct correspondence between two features and transfer it to the transparent areas. For the student branch, we propose a consistent feature correlation module (CFCM) that retains the reliable regions of RGB images and depth maps respectively according to the consistency and adopts a CNN to capture the pairwise relationship for depth completion. To avoid the student branch only learning regional features from the teacher branch, we devise a distillation loss that not only considers the distance loss but also the object structure and edge information. Extensive experiments conducted on the ClearGrasp dataset manifest that our teacher network outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of accuracy and generalization, and the student network achieves competitive results with a higher speed of 48 FPS. In addition, the significant improvement in a real-world robotic grasping system illustrates the effectiveness and robustness of our proposed system.
DiscipLink: Unfolding Interdisciplinary Information Seeking Process via Human-AI Co-Exploration
Authors: Chengbo Zheng, Yuanhao Zhang, Zeyu Huang, Chuhan Shi, Minrui Xu, Xiaojuan Ma
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00

Interdisciplinary studies often require researchers to explore literature in diverse branches of knowledge. Yet, navigating through the highly scattered knowledge from unfamiliar disciplines poses a significant challenge. In this paper, we introduce DiscipLink, a novel interactive system that facilitates collaboration between researchers and large language models (LLMs) in interdisciplinary information seeking (IIS). Based on users' topics of interest, DiscipLink initiates exploratory questions from the perspectives of possible relevant fields of study, and users can further tailor these questions. DiscipLink then supports users in searching and screening papers under selected questions by automatically expanding queries with disciplinary-specific terminologies, extracting themes from retrieved papers, and highlighting the connections between papers and questions. Our evaluation, comprising a within-subject comparative experiment and an open-ended exploratory study, reveals that DiscipLink can effectively support researchers in breaking down disciplinary boundaries and integrating scattered knowledge in diverse fields. The findings underscore the potential of LLM-powered tools in fostering information-seeking practices and bolstering interdisciplinary research.
Towards Explainable and Interpretable Musical Difficulty Estimation: A Parameter-efficient Approach
Authors: Pedro Ramoneda, Vsevolod Eremenko, Alexandre D'Hooge, Emilia Parada-Cabaleiro, Xavier Serra
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Music Information Retrieval

Estimating music piece difficulty is important for organizing educational music collections. This process could be partially automatized to facilitate the educator's role. Nevertheless, the decisions performed by prevalent deep-learning models are hardly understandable, which may impair the acceptance of such a technology in music education curricula. Our work employs explainable descriptors for difficulty estimation in symbolic music representations. Furthermore, through a novel parameter-efficient white-box model, we outperform previous efforts while delivering interpretable results. These comprehensible outcomes emulate the functionality of a rubric, a tool widely used in music education. Our approach, evaluated in piano repertoire categorized in 9 classes, achieved 41.4% accuracy independently, with a mean squared error (MSE) of 1.7, showing precise difficulty estimation. Through our baseline, we illustrate how building on top of past research can offer alternatives for music difficulty assessment which are explainable and interpretable. With this, we aim to promote a more effective communication between the Music Information Retrieval (MIR) community and the music education one.
Deceptive AI systems that give explanations are more convincing than honest AI systems and can amplify belief in misinformation
Authors: Valdemar Danry, Pat Pataranutaporn, Matthew Groh, Ziv Epstein, Pattie Maes
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Logical Reasoning, Misinformation, Persuasiveness

Advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems, specifically large language models (LLMs), have the capability to generate not just misinformation, but also deceptive explanations that can justify and propagate false information and erode trust in the truth. We examined the impact of deceptive AI generated explanations on individuals' beliefs in a pre-registered online experiment with 23,840 observations from 1,192 participants. We found that in addition to being more persuasive than accurate and honest explanations, AI-generated deceptive explanations can significantly amplify belief in false news headlines and undermine true ones as compared to AI systems that simply classify the headline incorrectly as being true/false. Moreover, our results show that personal factors such as cognitive reflection and trust in AI do not necessarily protect individuals from these effects caused by deceptive AI generated explanations. Instead, our results show that the logical validity of AI generated deceptive explanations, that is whether the explanation has a causal effect on the truthfulness of the AI's classification, plays a critical role in countering their persuasiveness - with logically invalid explanations being deemed less credible. This underscores the importance of teaching logical reasoning and critical thinking skills to identify logically invalid arguments, fostering greater resilience against advanced AI-driven misinformation.
Need of AI in Modern Education: in the Eyes of Explainable AI (xAI)
Authors: Supriya Manna, Niladri Sett
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00

Modern Education is not \textit{Modern} without AI. However, AI's complex nature makes understanding and fixing problems challenging. Research worldwide shows that a parent's income greatly influences a child's education. This led us to explore how AI, especially complex models, makes important decisions using Explainable AI tools. Our research uncovered many complexities linked to parental income and offered reasonable explanations for these decisions. However, we also found biases in AI that go against what we want from AI in education: clear transparency and equal access for everyone. These biases can impact families and children's schooling, highlighting the need for better AI solutions that offer fair opportunities to all. This chapter tries to shed light on the complex ways AI operates, especially concerning biases. These are the foundational steps towards better educational policies, which include using AI in ways that are more reliable, accountable, and beneficial for everyone involved.
Enhanced Fault Detection and Cause Identification Using Integrated Attention Mechanism
Authors: Mohammad Ali Labbaf Khaniki, Alireza Golkarieh, Houman Nouri, Mohammad Manthouri
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Fault Detection

This study introduces a novel methodology for fault detection and cause identification within the Tennessee Eastman Process (TEP) by integrating a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) neural network with an Integrated Attention Mechanism (IAM). The IAM combines the strengths of scaled dot product attention, residual attention, and dynamic attention to capture intricate patterns and dependencies crucial for TEP fault detection. Initially, the attention mechanism extracts important features from the input data, enhancing the model's interpretability and relevance. The BiLSTM network processes these features bidirectionally to capture long-range dependencies, and the IAM further refines the output, leading to improved fault detection results. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of this approach, showcasing superior performance in accuracy, false alarm rate, and misclassification rate compared to existing methods. This methodology provides a robust and interpretable solution for fault detection and diagnosis in the TEP, highlighting its potential for industrial applications.
Con4m: Context-aware Consistency Learning Framework for Segmented Time Series Classification
Authors: Junru Chen, Tianyu Cao, Jing Xu, Jiahe Li, Zhilong Chen, Tao Xiao, Yang Yang
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Classification

Time Series Classification (TSC) encompasses two settings: classifying entire sequences or classifying segmented subsequences. The raw time series for segmented TSC usually contain Multiple classes with Varying Duration of each class (MVD). Therefore, the characteristics of MVD pose unique challenges for segmented TSC, yet have been largely overlooked by existing works. Specifically, there exists a natural temporal dependency between consecutive instances (segments) to be classified within MVD. However, mainstream TSC models rely on the assumption of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.), focusing on independently modeling each segment. Additionally, annotators with varying expertise may provide inconsistent boundary labels, leading to unstable performance of noise-free TSC models. To address these challenges, we first formally demonstrate that valuable contextual information enhances the discriminative power of classification instances. Leveraging the contextual priors of MVD at both the data and label levels, we propose a novel consistency learning framework Con4m, which effectively utilizes contextual information more conducive to discriminating consecutive segments in segmented TSC tasks, while harmonizing inconsistent boundary labels for training. Extensive experiments across multiple datasets validate the effectiveness of Con4m in handling segmented TSC tasks on MVD.
Areas of Improvement for Autonomous Vehicles: A Machine Learning Analysis of Disengagement Reports
Authors: Tyler Ward
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Autonomous Vehicles

Since 2014, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (CDMV) has compiled information from manufacturers of autonomous vehicles (AVs) regarding factors that lead to the disengagement from autonomous driving mode in these vehicles. These disengagement reports (DRs) contain information detailing whether the AV disengaged from autonomous mode due to technology failure, manual override, or other factors during driving tests. This paper presents a machine learning (ML) based analysis of the information from the 2023 DRs. We use a natural language processing (NLP) approach to extract important information from the description of a disengagement, and use the k-Means clustering algorithm to group report entries together. The cluster frequency is then analyzed, and each cluster is manually categorized based on the factors leading to disengagement. We discuss findings from previous years' DRs, and provide our own analysis to identify areas of improvement for AVs.
Preference-Based Abstract Argumentation for Case-Based Reasoning (with Appendix)
Authors: Adam Gould, Guilherme Paulino-Passos, Seema Dadhania, Matthew Williams, Francesca Toni
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstract Argumentation, Interpretable Machine Learning

In the pursuit of enhancing the efficacy and flexibility of interpretable, data-driven classification models, this work introduces a novel incorporation of user-defined preferences with Abstract Argumentation and Case-Based Reasoning (CBR). Specifically, we introduce Preference-Based Abstract Argumentation for Case-Based Reasoning (which we call AA-CBR-P), allowing users to define multiple approaches to compare cases with an ordering that specifies their preference over these comparison approaches. We prove that the model inherently follows these preferences when making predictions and show that previous abstract argumentation for case-based reasoning approaches are insufficient at expressing preferences over constituents of an argument. We then demonstrate how this can be applied to a real-world medical dataset sourced from a clinical trial evaluating differing assessment methods of patients with a primary brain tumour. We show empirically that our approach outperforms other interpretable machine learning models on this dataset.
Inductive or Deductive? Rethinking the Fundamental Reasoning Abilities of LLMs
Authors: Kewei Cheng, Jingfeng Yang, Haoming Jiang, Zhengyang Wang, Binxuan Huang, Ruirui Li, Shiyang Li, Zheng Li, Yifan Gao, Xian Li, Bing Yin, Yizhou Sun
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Reasoning

Reasoning encompasses two typical types: deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Despite extensive research into the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), most studies have failed to rigorously differentiate between inductive and deductive reasoning, leading to a blending of the two. This raises an essential question: In LLM reasoning, which poses a greater challenge - deductive or inductive reasoning? While the deductive reasoning capabilities of LLMs, (i.e. their capacity to follow instructions in reasoning tasks), have received considerable attention, their abilities in true inductive reasoning remain largely unexplored. To investigate into the true inductive reasoning capabilities of LLMs, we propose a novel framework, SolverLearner. This framework enables LLMs to learn the underlying function (i.e., $y = f_w(x)$), that maps input data points $(x)$ to their corresponding output values $(y)$, using only in-context examples. By focusing on inductive reasoning and separating it from LLM-based deductive reasoning, we can isolate and investigate inductive reasoning of LLMs in its pure form via SolverLearner. Our observations reveal that LLMs demonstrate remarkable inductive reasoning capabilities through SolverLearner, achieving near-perfect performance with ACC of 1 in most cases. Surprisingly, despite their strong inductive reasoning abilities, LLMs tend to relatively lack deductive reasoning capabilities, particularly in tasks involving ``counterfactual'' reasoning.