pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Insect Identification in the Wild: The AMI Dataset
Authors: Aditya Jain, Fagner Cunha, Michael James Bunsen, Juan Sebastián Cañas, Léonard Pasi, Nathan Pinoy, Flemming Helsing, JoAnne Russo, Marc Botham, Michael Sabourin, Jonathan Fréchette, Alexandre Anctil, Yacksecari Lopez, Eduardo Navarro, Filonila Perez Pimentel, Ana Cecilia Zamora, José Alejandro Ramirez Silva, Jonathan Gagnon, Tom August, Kim Bjerge, Alba Gomez Segura, Marc Bélisle, Yves Basset, Kent P. McFarland, David Roy, Toke Thomas Høye, Maxim Larrivée, David Rolnick
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Diversity, Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Insects represent half of all global biodiversity, yet many of the world's insects are disappearing, with severe implications for ecosystems and agriculture. Despite this crisis, data on insect diversity and abundance remain woefully inadequate, due to the scarcity of human experts and the lack of scalable tools for monitoring. Ecologists have started to adopt camera traps to record and study insects, and have proposed computer vision algorithms as an answer for scalable data processing. However, insect monitoring in the wild poses unique challenges that have not yet been addressed within computer vision, including the combination of long-tailed data, extremely similar classes, and significant distribution shifts. We provide the first large-scale machine learning benchmarks for fine-grained insect recognition, designed to match real-world tasks faced by ecologists. Our contributions include a curated dataset of images from citizen science platforms and museums, and an expert-annotated dataset drawn from automated camera traps across multiple continents, designed to test out-of-distribution generalization under field conditions. We train and evaluate a variety of baseline algorithms and introduce a combination of data augmentation techniques that enhance generalization across geographies and hardware setups.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Generative Artificial Intelligence in Medicine
Authors: Rui Yang, Yilin Ning, Emilia Keppo, Mingxuan Liu, Chuan Hong, Danielle S Bitterman, Jasmine Chiat Ling Ong, Daniel Shu Wei Ting, Nan Liu
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has brought revolutionary innovations in various fields, including medicine. However, it also exhibits limitations. In response, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) provides a potential solution, enabling models to generate more accurate contents by leveraging the retrieval of external knowledge. With the rapid advancement of generative AI, RAG can pave the way for connecting this transformative technology with medical applications and is expected to bring innovations in equity, reliability, and personalization to health care.
Abstraction-of-Thought Makes Language Models Better Reasoners
Authors: Ruixin Hong, Hongming Zhang, Xiaoman Pan, Dong Yu, ChangShui Zhang
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00

Abstract reasoning, the ability to reason from the abstract essence of a problem, serves as a key to generalization in human reasoning. However, eliciting language models to perform reasoning with abstraction remains unexplored. This paper seeks to bridge this gap by introducing a novel structured reasoning format called Abstraction-of-Thought (AoT). The uniqueness of AoT lies in its explicit requirement for varying levels of abstraction within the reasoning process. This approach could elicit language models to first contemplate on the abstract level before incorporating concrete details, which is overlooked by the prevailing step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) method. To align models with the AoT format, we present AoT Collection, a generic finetuning dataset consisting of 348k high-quality samples with AoT reasoning processes, collected via an automated and scalable pipeline. We finetune a wide range of language models with AoT Collection and conduct extensive evaluations on 23 unseen tasks from the challenging benchmark Big-Bench Hard. Experimental results indicate that models aligned to AoT reasoning format substantially outperform those aligned to CoT in many reasoning tasks.
Cycle-Correspondence Loss: Learning Dense View-Invariant Visual Features from Unlabeled and Unordered RGB Images
Authors: David B. Adrian, Andras Gabor Kupcsik, Markus Spies, Heiko Neumann
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Robot Manipulation, valid

Robot manipulation relying on learned object-centric descriptors became popular in recent years. Visual descriptors can easily describe manipulation task objectives, they can be learned efficiently using self-supervision, and they can encode actuated and even non-rigid objects. However, learning robust, view-invariant keypoints in a self-supervised approach requires a meticulous data collection approach involving precise calibration and expert supervision. In this paper we introduce Cycle-Correspondence Loss (CCL) for view-invariant dense descriptor learning, which adopts the concept of cycle-consistency, enabling a simple data collection pipeline and training on unpaired RGB camera views. The key idea is to autonomously detect valid pixel correspondences by attempting to use a prediction over a new image to predict the original pixel in the original image, while scaling error terms based on the estimated confidence. Our evaluation shows that we outperform other self-supervised RGB-only methods, and approach performance of supervised methods, both with respect to keypoint tracking as well as for a robot grasping downstream task.
Federated Learning with Limited Node Labels
Authors: Bisheng Tang, Xiaojun Chen, Shaopu Wang, Yuexin Xuan, Zhendong Zhao
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Node Classification

Subgraph federated learning (SFL) is a research methodology that has gained significant attention for its potential to handle distributed graph-structured data. In SFL, the local model comprises graph neural networks (GNNs) with a partial graph structure. However, some SFL models have overlooked the significance of missing cross-subgraph edges, which can lead to local GNNs being unable to message-pass global representations to other parties' GNNs. Moreover, existing SFL models require substantial labeled data, which limits their practical applications. To overcome these limitations, we present a novel SFL framework called FedMpa that aims to learn cross-subgraph node representations. FedMpa first trains a multilayer perceptron (MLP) model using a small amount of data and then propagates the federated feature to the local structures. To further improve the embedding representation of nodes with local subgraphs, we introduce the FedMpae method, which reconstructs the local graph structure with an innovation view that applies pooling operation to form super-nodes. Our extensive experiments on six graph datasets demonstrate that FedMpa is highly effective in node classification. Furthermore, our ablation experiments verify the effectiveness of FedMpa.
MEMS and ECM Sensor Technologies for Cardiorespiratory Sound Monitoring - A Comprehensive Review
Authors: Yasaman Torabi, Shahram Shirani, James P. Reilly, Gail M Gauvreau
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00

This paper presents a comprehensive review of cardiorespiratory auscultation sensing devices (i.e., stethoscopes), which is useful for understanding the theoretical aspects and practical design notes. In this paper, we first introduce the acoustic properties of the heart and lungs, as well as a brief history of stethoscope evolution. Then, we discuss the basic concept of electret condenser microphones (ECMs) and a stethoscope based on them. Then, we discuss the microelectromechanical systems (MEMSs) technology, particularly focusing on piezoelectric transducer sensors. This paper comprehensively reviews sensing technologies for cardiorespiratory auscultation, emphasizing MEMS-based wearable designs in the past decade. To our knowledge, this is the first paper to summarize ECM and MEMS applications for heart and lung sound analysis.
PlanRAG: A Plan-then-Retrieval Augmented Generation for Generative Large Language Models as Decision Makers
Authors: Myeonghwa Lee, Seonho An, Min-Soo Kim
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

In this paper, we conduct a study to utilize LLMs as a solution for decision making that requires complex data analysis. We define Decision QA as the task of answering the best decision, $d_{best}$, for a decision-making question $Q$, business rules $R$ and a database $D$. Since there is no benchmark that can examine Decision QA, we propose Decision QA benchmark, DQA. It has two scenarios, Locating and Building, constructed from two video games (Europa Universalis IV and Victoria 3) that have almost the same goal as Decision QA. To address Decision QA effectively, we also propose a new RAG technique called the iterative plan-then-retrieval augmented generation (PlanRAG). Our PlanRAG-based LM generates the plan for decision making as the first step, and the retriever generates the queries for data analysis as the second step. The proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art iterative RAG method by 15.8% in the Locating scenario and by 7.4% in the Building scenario, respectively. We release our code and benchmark at https://github.com/myeon9h/PlanRAG.
Query Routing for Homogeneous Tools: An Instantiation in the RAG Scenario
Authors: Feiteng Mu, Yong Jiang, Liwen Zhang, Chu Liu, Wenjie Li, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG

Current research on tool learning primarily focuses on selecting the most effective tool from a wide array of options, often overlooking cost-effectiveness, a crucial factor in human problem-solving. In this paper, we address the selection of homogeneous tools by predicting both their performance and the associated cost required to accomplish a given task. We then assign queries to the optimal tools in a cost-effective manner. Our experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves higher performance at a lower cost compared to strong baseline approaches.
PSLM: Parallel Generation of Text and Speech with LLMs for Low-Latency Spoken Dialogue Systems
Authors: Kentaro Mitsui, Koh Mitsuda, Toshiaki Wakatsuki, Yukiya Hono, Kei Sawada
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Question Answering, Response Generation, Spoken Dialogue Systems

Multimodal language models that process both text and speech have a potential for applications in spoken dialogue systems. However, current models face two major challenges in response generation latency: (1) generating a spoken response requires the prior generation of a written response, and (2) speech sequences are significantly longer than text sequences. This study addresses these issues by extending the input and output sequences of the language model to support the parallel generation of text and speech. Our experiments on spoken question answering tasks demonstrate that our approach improves latency while maintaining the quality of response content. Additionally, we show that latency can be further reduced by generating speech in multiple sequences. Demo samples are available at https://rinnakk.github.io/research/publications/PSLM.
Beyond Under-Alignment: Atomic Preference Enhanced Factuality Tuning for Large Language Models
Authors: Hongbang Yuan, Yubo Chen, Pengfei Cao, Zhuoran Jin, Kang Liu, Jun Zhao
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success but still tend to generate factually erroneous responses, a phenomenon known as hallucination. A recent trend is to use preference learning to fine-tune models to align with factuality. However, existing work primarily evaluates fine-tuned models on in-domain (ID) datasets and the factuality on out-of-domain (OOD) datasets remains underexplored. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the factuality of different models tuned by various preference learning algorithms and demonstrate that their performance on OOD datasets either increases minimally or decreases. Subsequently, we reveal that the main cause of model's failure to uphold factuality under a distribution shift is \textbf{under-alignment}, rather than \textbf{over-alignment}, by analyzing the token distribution shift of the models before and after tuning. Finally, we propose \textbf{APEFT} (\textbf{A}tomic \textbf{P}reference \textbf{E}nhanced \textbf{F}actuality \textbf{T}uning), a framework that enhances model's awareness of factuality at the granularity of individual facts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that APEFT improves model performance by an average of $\boldsymbol{3.45\%}$ on both ID and OOD datasets, which is highly effective.
Pushing the Frontier on Approximate EFX Allocations
Authors: Georgios Amanatidis, Aris Filos-Ratsikas, Alkmini Sgouritsa
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00

We study the problem of allocating a set of indivisible goods to a set of agents with additive valuation functions, aiming to achieve approximate envy-freeness up to any good ($\alpha$-EFX). The state-of-the-art results on the problem include that (exact) EFX allocations exist when (a) there are at most three agents, or (b) the agents' valuation functions can take at most two values, or (c) the agents' valuation functions can be represented via a graph. For $\alpha$-EFX, it is known that a $0.618$-EFX allocation exists for any number of agents with additive valuation functions. In this paper, we show that $2/3$-EFX allocations exist when (a) there are at most \emph{seven agents}, (b) the agents' valuation functions can take at most \emph{three values}, or (c) the agents' valuation functions can be represented via a \emph{multigraph}. Our results can be interpreted in two ways. First, by relaxing the notion of EFX to $2/3$-EFX, we obtain existence results for strict generalizations of the settings for which exact EFX allocations are known to exist. Secondly, by imposing restrictions on the setting, we manage to beat the barrier of $0.618$ and achieve an approximation guarantee of $2/3$. Therefore, our results push the \emph{frontier} of existence and computation of approximate EFX allocations, and provide insights into the challenges of settling the existence of exact EFX allocations.
Community Detection in Networks: A Rough Sets and Consensus Clustering Approach
Authors: Darian H. Grass-Boada, Leandro González-Montesino, Rubén Armañanzas
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Community Detection

The objective of this paper is to propose a framework, called Rough Clustering-based Consensus Community Detection (RC-CCD), to effectively address the challenge of identifying community structures in complex networks from a set of different community partitions. The method uses a consensus approach based on Rough Set Theory (RST) to manage uncertainty and improve the reliability of community detection. The RC-CCD framework is tested on synthetic benchmark networks generated by the Lancichinetti-Fortunato-Radicchi (LFR) method, which simulate varying network scales, node degrees, and community sizes. Key findings demonstrate that RC-CCD outperforms established algorithms like Louvain, Greedy, and LPA in terms of normalized mutual information, showing superior accuracy and adaptability, particularly in networks with higher complexity, both in terms of size and dispersion. These results have significant implications for enhancing community detection in fields such as social and biological network analysis.
Fast Rates for Bandit PAC Multiclass Classification
Authors: Liad Erez, Alon Cohen, Tomer Koren, Yishay Mansour, Shay Moran
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, PAC learning, Stochastic Optimization

We study multiclass PAC learning with bandit feedback, where inputs are classified into one of $K$ possible labels and feedback is limited to whether or not the predicted labels are correct. Our main contribution is in designing a novel learning algorithm for the agnostic $(\varepsilon,\delta)$-PAC version of the problem, with sample complexity of $O\big( (\operatorname{poly}(K) + 1 / \varepsilon^2) \log (|H| / \delta) \big)$ for any finite hypothesis class $H$. In terms of the leading dependence on $\varepsilon$, this improves upon existing bounds for the problem, that are of the form $O(K/\varepsilon^2)$. We also provide an extension of this result to general classes and establish similar sample complexity bounds in which $\log |H|$ is replaced by the Natarajan dimension. This matches the optimal rate in the full-information version of the problem and resolves an open question studied by Daniely, Sabato, Ben-David, and Shalev-Shwartz (2011) who demonstrated that the multiplicative price of bandit feedback in realizable PAC learning is $\Theta(K)$. We complement this by revealing a stark contrast with the agnostic case, where the price of bandit feedback is only $O(1)$ as $\varepsilon \to 0$. Our algorithm utilizes a stochastic optimization technique to minimize a log-barrier potential based on Frank-Wolfe updates for computing a low-variance exploration distribution over the hypotheses, and is made computationally efficient provided access to an ERM oracle over $H$.
PDSS: A Privacy-Preserving Framework for Step-by-Step Distillation of Large Language Models
Authors: Tao Fan, Yan Kang, Weijing Chen, Hanlin Gu, Yuanfeng Song, Lixin Fan, Kai Chen, Qiang Yang
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multi-Task Learning, Privacy Preserving, Small Language Model, Text Generation

In the context of real-world applications, leveraging large language models (LLMs) for domain-specific tasks often faces two major challenges: domain-specific knowledge privacy and constrained resources. To address these issues, we propose PDSS, a privacy-preserving framework for step-by-step distillation of LLMs. PDSS works on a server-client architecture, wherein client transmits perturbed prompts to the server's LLM for rationale generation. The generated rationales are then decoded by the client and used to enrich the training of task-specific small language model(SLM) within a multi-task learning paradigm. PDSS introduces two privacy protection strategies: the Exponential Mechanism Strategy and the Encoder-Decoder Strategy, balancing prompt privacy and rationale usability. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of PDSS in various text generation tasks, enabling the training of task-specific SLM with enhanced performance while prioritizing data privacy protection.
A Cutting-Edge Deep Learning Method For Enhancing IoT Security
Authors: Nadia Ansar, Mohammad Sadique Ansari, Mohammad Sharique, Aamina Khatoon, Md Abdul Malik, Md Munir Siddiqui
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Intrusion Detection

There have been significant issues given the IoT, with heterogeneity of billions of devices and with a large amount of data. This paper proposed an innovative design of the Internet of Things (IoT) Environment Intrusion Detection System (or IDS) using Deep Learning-integrated Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) and Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM) networks. Our model, based on the CICIDS2017 dataset, achieved an accuracy of 99.52% in classifying network traffic as either benign or malicious. The real-time processing capability, scalability, and low false alarm rate in our model surpass some traditional IDS approaches and, therefore, prove successful for application in today's IoT networks. The development and the performance of the model, with possible applications that may extend to other related fields of adaptive learning techniques and cross-domain applicability, are discussed. The research involving deep learning for IoT cybersecurity offers a potent solution for significantly improving network security.
QueerBench: Quantifying Discrimination in Language Models Toward Queer Identities
Authors: Mae Sosto, Alberto Barrón-Cedeño
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Masked Language Modeling, Sentence

With the increasing role of Natural Language Processing (NLP) in various applications, challenges concerning bias and stereotype perpetuation are accentuated, which often leads to hate speech and harm. Despite existing studies on sexism and misogyny, issues like homophobia and transphobia remain underexplored and often adopt binary perspectives, putting the safety of LGBTQIA+ individuals at high risk in online spaces. In this paper, we assess the potential harm caused by sentence completions generated by English large language models (LLMs) concerning LGBTQIA+ individuals. This is achieved using QueerBench, our new assessment framework, which employs a template-based approach and a Masked Language Modeling (MLM) task. The analysis indicates that large language models tend to exhibit discriminatory behaviour more frequently towards individuals within the LGBTQIA+ community, reaching a difference gap of 7.2% in the QueerBench score of harmfulness.
GW-MoE: Resolving Uncertainty in MoE Router with Global Workspace Theory
Authors: Haoze Wu, Zihan Qiu, Zili Wang, Hang Zhao, Jie Fu
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Mathematical Problem-Solving, Mixture-of-Experts, Question Answering, text-classification, Text Classification

Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) has been demonstrated as an efficient method to scale up models. By dynamically and sparsely selecting activated experts, MoE can effectively reduce computational costs. Despite the success, we observe that many tokens in the MoE models have uncertain routing results. These tokens have nearly equal scores for choosing each expert, and we demonstrate that this uncertainty can lead to incorrect selections. Inspired by the Global Workspace Theory (GWT), we propose a new fine-tuning method, GW-MoE, to address this issue. The core idea is to broadcast the uncertain tokens across experts during fine-tuning. Therefore, these tokens can acquire the necessary knowledge from any expert during inference and become less sensitive to the choice. GW-MoE does not introduce additional inference overhead. We validate that GW can mitigate the uncertain problem and consistently improve in different tasks (text classification, question answering, summarization, code generation, and mathematical problem solving) and model sizes (650M and 8B parameters).
Problem-Solving in Language Model Networks
Authors: Ciaran Regan, Alexandre Gournail, Mizuki Oka
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, model, Question Answering

To improve the reasoning and question-answering capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), several multi-agent approaches have been introduced. While these methods enhance performance, the application of collective intelligence-based approaches to complex network structures and the dynamics of agent interactions remain underexplored. This work extends the concept of multi-agent debate to more general network topologies, measuring the question-answering accuracy, influence, consensus, and the effects of bias on the collective. The results show that random networks perform similarly to fully connected networks despite using significantly fewer tokens. Furthermore, a strong consensus among agents correlates with correct answers, whereas divided responses typically indicate incorrect answers. Analysing the influence of the agents reveals a balance between self-reflection and interconnectedness; self-reflection aids when local interactions are incorrect, and local interactions aid when the agent itself is incorrect. Additionally, bias plays a strong role in system performance with correctly biased hub nodes boosting performance. These insights suggest that using random networks or scale-free networks with knowledgeable agents placed in central positions can enhance the overall question-answering performance of multi-agent systems.