pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Reimagining Linear Probing: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks in Transfer Learning
Authors: Sheng Shen, Rabih Younes
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks, Transfer Learning

This paper introduces Kolmogorov-Arnold Networks (KAN) as an enhancement to the traditional linear probing method in transfer learning. Linear probing, often applied to the final layer of pre-trained models, is limited by its inability to model complex relationships in data. To address this, we propose substituting the linear probing layer with KAN, which leverages spline-based representations to approximate intricate functions. In this study, we integrate KAN with a ResNet-50 model pre-trained on ImageNet and evaluate its performance on the CIFAR-10 dataset. We perform a systematic hyperparameter search, focusing on grid size and spline degree (k), to optimize KAN's flexibility and accuracy. Our results demonstrate that KAN consistently outperforms traditional linear probing, achieving significant improvements in accuracy and generalization across a range of configurations. These findings indicate that KAN offers a more powerful and adaptable alternative to conventional linear probing techniques in transfer learning.
Relevance for Human Robot Collaboration
Authors: Xiaotong Zhang, DeAn Huang, Kamal Youcef-Toumi
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Scene Understanding, Task Planning

Inspired by the human ability to selectively focus on relevant information, this paper introduces relevance, a novel dimensionality reduction process for human-robot collaboration (HRC). Our approach incorporates a continuously operating perception module, evaluates cue sufficiency within the scene, and applies a flexible formulation and computation framework. To accurately and efficiently quantify relevance, we developed an event-based framework that maintains a continuous perception of the scene and selectively triggers relevance determination. Within this framework, we developed a probabilistic methodology, which considers various factors and is built on a novel structured scene representation. Simulation results demonstrate that the relevance framework and methodology accurately predict the relevance of a general HRC setup, achieving a precision of 0.99, a recall of 0.94, an F1 score of 0.96, and an object ratio of 0.94. Relevance can be broadly applied to several areas in HRC to accurately improve task planning time by 79.56% compared with pure planning for a cereal task, reduce perception latency by up to 26.53% for an object detector, improve HRC safety by up to 13.50% and reduce the number of inquiries for HRC by 80.84%. A real-world demonstration showcases the relevance framework's ability to intelligently and seamlessly assist humans in everyday tasks.
Multi-object event graph representation learning for Video Question Answering
Authors: Yanan Wang, Shuichiro Haruta, Donghuo Zeng, Julio Vizcarra, Mori Kurokawa
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Graph Representation Learning, Object, Question Answering, Representation Learning, Video Question Answering

Video question answering (VideoQA) is a task to predict the correct answer to questions posed about a given video. The system must comprehend spatial and temporal relationships among objects extracted from videos to perform causal and temporal reasoning. While prior works have focused on modeling individual object movements using transformer-based methods, they falter when capturing complex scenarios involving multiple objects (e.g., "a boy is throwing a ball in a hoop"). We propose a contrastive language event graph representation learning method called CLanG to address this limitation. Aiming to capture event representations associated with multiple objects, our method employs a multi-layer GNN-cluster module for adversarial graph representation learning, enabling contrastive learning between the question text and its relevant multi-object event graph. Our method outperforms a strong baseline, achieving up to 2.2% higher accuracy on two challenging VideoQA datasets, NExT-QA and TGIF-QA-R. In particular, it is 2.8% better than baselines in handling causal and temporal questions, highlighting its strength in reasoning multiple object-based events.
Transfer Learning Applied to Computer Vision Problems: Survey on Current Progress, Limitations, and Opportunities
Authors: Aaryan Panda, Damodar Panigrahi, Shaswata Mitra, Sudip Mittal, Shahram Rahimi
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

The field of Computer Vision (CV) has faced challenges. Initially, it relied on handcrafted features and rule-based algorithms, resulting in limited accuracy. The introduction of machine learning (ML) has brought progress, particularly Transfer Learning (TL), which addresses various CV problems by reusing pre-trained models. TL requires less data and computing while delivering nearly equal accuracy, making it a prominent technique in the CV landscape. Our research focuses on TL development and how CV applications use it to solve real-world problems. We discuss recent developments, limitations, and opportunities.
GRE^2-MDCL: Graph Representation Embedding Enhanced via Multidimensional Contrastive Learning
Authors: Kaizhe Fan, Quanjun Li
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Community Detection, Contrastive Learning, Graph Neural Network, Graph Representation Learning, Node Classification, Representation Learning

Graph representation learning has emerged as a powerful tool for preserving graph topology when mapping nodes to vector representations, enabling various downstream tasks such as node classification and community detection. However, most current graph neural network models face the challenge of requiring extensive labeled data, which limits their practical applicability in real-world scenarios where labeled data is scarce. To address this challenge, researchers have explored Graph Contrastive Learning (GCL), which leverages enhanced graph data and contrastive learning techniques. While promising, existing GCL methods often struggle with effectively capturing both local and global graph structures, and balancing the trade-off between nodelevel and graph-level representations. In this work, we propose Graph Representation Embedding Enhanced via Multidimensional Contrastive Learning (GRE2-MDCL). Our model introduces a novel triple network architecture with a multi-head attention GNN as the core. GRE2-MDCL first globally and locally augments the input graph using SVD and LAGNN techniques. It then constructs a multidimensional contrastive loss, incorporating cross-network, cross-view, and neighbor contrast, to optimize the model. Extensive experiments on benchmark datasets Cora, Citeseer, and PubMed demonstrate that GRE2-MDCL achieves state-of-the-art performance, with average accuracies of 82.5%, 72.5%, and 81.6% respectively. Visualizations further show tighter intra-cluster aggregation and clearer inter-cluster boundaries, highlighting the effectiveness of our framework in improving upon baseline GCL models.
Advancing Depth Anything Model for Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation in Endoscopy
Authors: Bojian Li, Bo Liu, Jinghua Yue, Fugen Zhou
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Depth Estimation, Monocular Depth Estimation, Unsupervised Monocular Depth Estimation

Depth estimation is a cornerstone of 3D reconstruction and plays a vital role in minimally invasive endoscopic surgeries. However, most current depth estimation networks rely on traditional convolutional neural networks, which are limited in their ability to capture global information. Foundation models offer a promising avenue for enhancing depth estimation, but those currently available are primarily trained on natural images, leading to suboptimal performance when applied to endoscopic images. In this work, we introduce a novel fine-tuning strategy for the Depth Anything Model and integrate it with an intrinsic-based unsupervised monocular depth estimation framework. Our approach includes a low-rank adaptation technique based on random vectors, which improves the model's adaptability to different scales. Additionally, we propose a residual block built on depthwise separable convolution to compensate for the transformer's limited ability to capture high-frequency details, such as edges and textures. Our experimental results on the SCARED dataset show that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance while minimizing the number of trainable parameters. Applying this method in minimally invasive endoscopic surgery could significantly enhance both the precision and safety of these procedures.
FIReStereo: Forest InfraRed Stereo Dataset for UAS Depth Perception in Visually Degraded Environments
Authors: Devansh Dhrafani, Yifei Liu, Andrew Jong, Ukcheol Shin, Yao He, Tyler Harp, Yaoyu Hu, Jean Oh, Sebastian Scherer
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Depth Estimation, Stereo Depth Estimation

Robust depth perception in visually-degraded environments is crucial for autonomous aerial systems. Thermal imaging cameras, which capture infrared radiation, are robust to visual degradation. However, due to lack of a large-scale dataset, the use of thermal cameras for unmanned aerial system (UAS) depth perception has remained largely unexplored. This paper presents a stereo thermal depth perception dataset for autonomous aerial perception applications. The dataset consists of stereo thermal images, LiDAR, IMU and ground truth depth maps captured in urban and forest settings under diverse conditions like day, night, rain, and smoke. We benchmark representative stereo depth estimation algorithms, offering insights into their performance in degraded conditions. Models trained on our dataset generalize well to unseen smoky conditions, highlighting the robustness of stereo thermal imaging for depth perception. We aim for this work to enhance robotic perception in disaster scenarios, allowing for exploration and operations in previously unreachable areas. The dataset and source code are available at https://firestereo.github.io.
Attack End-to-End Autonomous Driving through Module-Wise Noise
Authors: Lu Wang, Tianyuan Zhang, Yikai Han, Muyang Fang, Ting Jin, Jiaqi Kang
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

With recent breakthroughs in deep neural networks, numerous tasks within autonomous driving have exhibited remarkable performance. However, deep learning models are susceptible to adversarial attacks, presenting significant security risks to autonomous driving systems. Presently, end-to-end architectures have emerged as the predominant solution for autonomous driving, owing to their collaborative nature across different tasks. Yet, the implications of adversarial attacks on such models remain relatively unexplored. In this paper, we conduct comprehensive adversarial security research on the modular end-to-end autonomous driving model for the first time. We thoroughly consider the potential vulnerabilities in the model inference process and design a universal attack scheme through module-wise noise injection. We conduct large-scale experiments on the full-stack autonomous driving model and demonstrate that our attack method outperforms previous attack methods. We trust that our research will offer fresh insights into ensuring the safety and reliability of autonomous driving systems.
Super Monotonic Alignment Search
Authors: Junhyeok Lee, Hyeongju Kim
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU

Monotonic alignment search (MAS), introduced by Glow-TTS, is one of the most popular algorithm in TTS to estimate unknown alignments between text and speech. Since this algorithm needs to search for the most probable alignment with dynamic programming by caching all paths, the time complexity of the algorithm is $O(T \times S)$. The authors of Glow-TTS run this algorithm on CPU, and while they mentioned it is difficult to parallelize, we found that MAS can be parallelized in text-length dimension and CPU execution consumes an inordinate amount of time for inter-device copy. Therefore, we implemented a Triton kernel and PyTorch JIT script to accelerate MAS on GPU without inter-device copy. As a result, Super-MAS Triton kernel is up to 72 times faster in the extreme-length case. The code is available at \url{https://github.com/supertone-inc/super-monotonic-align}.
DSBench: How Far Are Data Science Agents to Becoming Data Science Experts?
Authors: Liqiang Jing, Zhehui Huang, Xiaoyang Wang, Wenlin Yao, Wenhao Yu, Kaixin Ma, Hongming Zhang, Xinya Du, Dong Yu
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive language/vision reasoning abilities, igniting the recent trend of building agents for targeted applications such as shopping assistants or AI software engineers. Recently, many data science benchmarks have been proposed to investigate their performance in the data science domain. However, existing data science benchmarks still fall short when compared to real-world data science applications due to their simplified settings. To bridge this gap, we introduce DSBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate data science agents with realistic tasks. This benchmark includes 466 data analysis tasks and 74 data modeling tasks, sourced from Eloquence and Kaggle competitions. DSBench offers a realistic setting by encompassing long contexts, multimodal task backgrounds, reasoning with large data files and multi-table structures, and performing end-to-end data modeling tasks. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art LLMs, LVLMs, and agents shows that they struggle with most tasks, with the best agent solving only 34.12% of data analysis tasks and achieving a 34.74% Relative Performance Gap (RPG). These findings underscore the need for further advancements in developing more practical, intelligent, and autonomous data science agents.
Modeling Information Narrative Detection and Evolution on Telegram during the Russia-Ukraine War
Authors: Patrick Gerard, Svitlana Volkova, Louis Penafiel, Kristina Lerman, Tim Weninger
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00

Following the Russian Federation's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, a multitude of information narratives emerged within both pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian communities online. As the conflict progresses, so too do the information narratives, constantly adapting and influencing local and global community perceptions and attitudes. This dynamic nature of the evolving information environment (IE) underscores a critical need to fully discern how narratives evolve and affect online communities. Existing research, however, often fails to capture information narrative evolution, overlooking both the fluid nature of narratives and the internal mechanisms that drive their evolution. Recognizing this, we introduce a novel approach designed to both model narrative evolution and uncover the underlying mechanisms driving them. In this work we perform a comparative discourse analysis across communities on Telegram covering the initial three months following the invasion. First, we uncover substantial disparities in narratives and perceptions between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian communities. Then, we probe deeper into prevalent narratives of each group, identifying key themes and examining the underlying mechanisms fueling their evolution. Finally, we explore influences and factors that may shape the development and spread of narratives.
Open-Vocabulary Remote Sensing Image Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Qinglong Cao, Yuntian Chen, Chao Ma, Xiaokang Yang
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Semantic Segmentation

Open-vocabulary image semantic segmentation (OVS) seeks to segment images into semantic regions across an open set of categories. Existing OVS methods commonly depend on foundational vision-language models and utilize similarity computation to tackle OVS tasks. However, these approaches are predominantly tailored to natural images and struggle with the unique characteristics of remote sensing images, such as rapidly changing orientations and significant scale variations. These challenges complicate OVS tasks in earth vision, requiring specialized approaches. To tackle this dilemma, we propose the first OVS framework specifically designed for remote sensing imagery, drawing inspiration from the distinct remote sensing traits. Particularly, to address the varying orientations, we introduce a rotation-aggregative similarity computation module that generates orientation-adaptive similarity maps as initial semantic maps. These maps are subsequently refined at both spatial and categorical levels to produce more accurate semantic maps. Additionally, to manage significant scale changes, we integrate multi-scale image features into the upsampling process, resulting in the final scale-aware semantic masks. To advance OVS in earth vision and encourage reproducible research, we establish the first open-sourced OVS benchmark for remote sensing imagery, including four public remote sensing datasets. Extensive experiments on this benchmark demonstrate our proposed method achieves state-of-the-art performance. All codes and datasets are available at https://github.com/caoql98/OVRS.
An Unsupervised Dialogue Topic Segmentation Model Based on Utterance Rewriting
Authors: Xia Hou, QiFeng Li, Tongliang Li
Date: 2024-09-12 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Segmentation, Semantic Similarity, Semantic Textual Similarity

Dialogue topic segmentation plays a crucial role in various types of dialogue modeling tasks. The state-of-the-art unsupervised DTS methods learn topic-aware discourse representations from conversation data through adjacent discourse matching and pseudo segmentation to further mine useful clues in unlabeled conversational relations. However, in multi-round dialogs, discourses often have co-references or omissions, leading to the fact that direct use of these discourses for representation learning may negatively affect the semantic similarity computation in the neighboring discourse matching task. In order to fully utilize the useful cues in conversational relations, this study proposes a novel unsupervised dialog topic segmentation method that combines the Utterance Rewriting (UR) technique with an unsupervised learning algorithm to efficiently utilize the useful cues in unlabeled dialogs by rewriting the dialogs in order to recover the co-referents and omitted words. Compared with existing unsupervised models, the proposed Discourse Rewriting Topic Segmentation Model (UR-DTS) significantly improves the accuracy of topic segmentation. The main finding is that the performance on DialSeg711 improves by about 6% in terms of absolute error score and WD, achieving 11.42% in terms of absolute error score and 12.97% in terms of WD. on Doc2Dial the absolute error score and WD improves by about 3% and 2%, respectively, resulting in SOTA reaching 35.17% in terms of absolute error score and 38.49% in terms of WD. This shows that the model is very effective in capturing the nuances of conversational topics, as well as the usefulness and challenges of utilizing unlabeled conversations.
Passed the Turing Test: Living in Turing Futures
Authors: Bernardo Gonçalves
Date: 2024-09-11 00:00:00

The world has seen the emergence of machines based on pretrained models, transformers, also known as generative artificial intelligences for their ability to produce various types of content, including text, images, audio, and synthetic data. Without resorting to preprogramming or special tricks, their intelligence grows as they learn from experience, and to ordinary people, they can appear human-like in conversation. This means that they can pass the Turing test, and that we are now living in one of many possible Turing futures where machines can pass for what they are not. However, the learning machines that Turing imagined would pass his imitation tests were machines inspired by the natural development of the low-energy human cortex. They would be raised like human children and naturally learn the ability to deceive an observer. These ``child machines,'' Turing hoped, would be powerful enough to have an impact on society and nature.
Feature Importance in Pedestrian Intention Prediction: A Context-Aware Review
Authors: Mohsen Azarmi, Mahdi Rezaei, He Wang, Ali Arabian
Date: 2024-09-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Feature Importance, feature selection, Prediction

Recent advancements in predicting pedestrian crossing intentions for Autonomous Vehicles using Computer Vision and Deep Neural Networks are promising. However, the black-box nature of DNNs poses challenges in understanding how the model works and how input features contribute to final predictions. This lack of interpretability delimits the trust in model performance and hinders informed decisions on feature selection, representation, and model optimisation; thereby affecting the efficacy of future research in the field. To address this, we introduce Context-aware Permutation Feature Importance (CAPFI), a novel approach tailored for pedestrian intention prediction. CAPFI enables more interpretability and reliable assessments of feature importance by leveraging subdivided scenario contexts, mitigating the randomness of feature values through targeted shuffling. This aims to reduce variance and prevent biased estimations in importance scores during permutations. We divide the Pedestrian Intention Estimation (PIE) dataset into 16 comparable context sets, measure the baseline performance of five distinct neural network architectures for intention prediction in each context, and assess input feature importance using CAPFI. We observed nuanced differences among models across various contextual characteristics. The research reveals the critical role of pedestrian bounding boxes and ego-vehicle speed in predicting pedestrian intentions, and potential prediction biases due to the speed feature through cross-context permutation evaluation. We propose an alternative feature representation by considering proximity change rate for rendering dynamic pedestrian-vehicle locomotion, thereby enhancing the contributions of input features to intention prediction. These findings underscore the importance of contextual features and their diversity to develop accurate and robust intent-predictive models.
Can We Count on LLMs? The Fixed-Effect Fallacy and Claims of GPT-4 Capabilities
Authors: Thomas Ball, Shuo Chen, Cormac Herley
Date: 2024-09-11 00:00:00

In this paper we explore evaluation of LLM capabilities. We present measurements of GPT-4 performance on several deterministic tasks; each task involves a basic calculation and takes as input parameter some element drawn from a large well-defined population (e.g., count elements in a list, multiply two k-digit numbers, etc). We examine several conditions per-task and perform enough trials so that statistically significant differences can be detected. This allows us to investigate the sensitivity of task-accuracy both to query phrasing and input parameter population. We find that seemingly trivial modifications in the task-prompt or input population can yield differences far larger than can be explained by sampling effects. For example, performance on a simple list-counting task varies with query-phrasing and list-length, but also with list composition (i.e., the thing-to-be-counted) and object frequency (e.g., success when an element accounts for $\approx$ 50\% of a list is different from when it accounts for $\approx$ 70\% etc). We conclude that efforts to quantify LLM capabilities easily succumb to the language-as-fixed-effect fallacy, where experimental observations are improperly generalized beyond what the data supports. A consequence appears to be that intuitions that have been formed based on interactions with humans form a very unreliable guide as to which input modifications should ``make no difference'' to LLM performance.