pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Add-it: Training-Free Object Insertion in Images With Pretrained Diffusion Models
Authors: Yoad Tewel, Rinon Gal, Dvir Samuel, Yuval Atzmon, Lior Wolf, Gal Chechik
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Adding Object into images based on text instructions is a challenging task in semantic image editing, requiring a balance between preserving the original scene and seamlessly integrating the new object in a fitting location. Despite extensive efforts, existing models often struggle with this balance, particularly with finding a natural location for adding an object in complex scenes. We introduce Add-it, a training-free approach that extends diffusion models' attention mechanisms to incorporate information from three key sources: the scene image, the text prompt, and the generated image itself. Our weighted extended-attention mechanism maintains structural consistency and fine details while ensuring natural object placement. Without task-specific fine-tuning, Add-it achieves state-of-the-art results on both real and generated image insertion benchmarks, including our newly constructed "Additing Affordance Benchmark" for evaluating object placement plausibility, outperforming supervised methods. Human evaluations show that Add-it is preferred in over 80% of cases, and it also demonstrates improvements in various automated metrics.
ChemToolAgent: The Impact of Tools on Language Agents for Chemistry Problem Solving
Authors: Botao Yu, Frazier N. Baker, Ziru Chen, Garrett Herb, Boyu Gou, Daniel Adu-Ampratwum, Xia Ning, Huan Sun
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

To enhance large language models (LLMs) for chemistry problem solving, several LLM-based agents augmented with tools have been proposed, such as ChemCrow and Coscientist. However, their evaluations are narrow in scope, leaving a large gap in understanding the benefits of tools across diverse chemistry tasks. To bridge this gap, we develop ChemToolAgent, an enhanced chemistry agent over ChemCrow, and conduct a comprehensive evaluation of its performance on both specialized chemistry tasks and general chemistry questions. Surprisingly, ChemToolAgent does not consistently outperform its base LLMs without tools. Our error analysis with a chemistry expert suggests that: For specialized chemistry tasks, such as synthesis prediction, we should augment agents with specialized tools; however, for general chemistry questions like those in exams, agents' ability to reason correctly with chemistry knowledge matters more, and tool augmentation does not always help.
Grounding Video Models to Actions through Goal Conditioned Exploration
Authors: Yunhao Luo, Yilun Du
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Generation, Visual Navigation

Large video models, pretrained on massive amounts of Internet video, provide a rich source of physical knowledge about the dynamics and motions of objects and tasks. However, video models are not grounded in the embodiment of an agent, and do not describe how to actuate the world to reach the visual states depicted in a video. To tackle this problem, current methods use a separate vision-based inverse dynamic model trained on embodiment-specific data to map image states to actions. Gathering data to train such a model is often expensive and challenging, and this model is limited to visual settings similar to the ones in which data are available. In this paper, we investigate how to directly ground video models to continuous actions through self-exploration in the embodied environment -- using generated video states as visual goals for exploration. We propose a framework that uses trajectory level action generation in combination with video guidance to enable an agent to solve complex tasks without any external supervision, e.g., rewards, action labels, or segmentation masks. We validate the proposed approach on 8 tasks in Libero, 6 tasks in MetaWorld, 4 tasks in Calvin, and 12 tasks in iThor Visual Navigation. We show how our approach is on par with or even surpasses multiple behavior cloning baselines trained on expert demonstrations while without requiring any action annotations.
TreeCoders: Trees of Transformers
Authors: Pierre Colonna D'Istria, Abdulrahman Altahhan
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

In this paper, we introduce TreeCoders, a novel family of transformer trees. We moved away from traditional linear transformers to complete k-ary trees. Transformer blocks serve as nodes, and generic classifiers learn to select the best child and route the sequence of tokens to a specific leaf. The selectors, moved outside the transformer blocks, allow for the use of a variety of architecture without further modifications. Furthermore, our proposed architecture supports sparse node activation due to the logarithmic complexity of a tree search. We validate our idea by testing a series of decoder-only tree transformers, achieving competitive results across a diverse range of language datasets. Our study demonstrates that the proposed tree transformer model outperforms a size-equivalent linear transformer model 76\% of the time over a wide range of tree architectures. Furthermore, our proposed model naturally lends itself to distributed implementation.
'Explaining RL Decisions with Trajectories': A Reproducibility Study
Authors: Karim Abdel Sadek, Matteo Nulli, Joan Velja, Jort Vincenti
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

This work investigates the reproducibility of the paper 'Explaining RL decisions with trajectories'. The original paper introduces a novel approach in explainable reinforcement learning based on the attribution decisions of an agent to specific clusters of trajectories encountered during training. We verify the main claims from the paper, which state that (i) training on less trajectories induces a lower initial state value, (ii) trajectories in a cluster present similar high-level patterns, (iii) distant trajectories influence the decision of an agent, and (iv) humans correctly identify the attributed trajectories to the decision of the agent. We recover the environments used by the authors based on the partial original code they provided for one of the environments (Grid-World), and implemented the remaining from scratch (Seaquest, HalfCheetah, Breakout and Q*Bert). While we confirm that (i), (ii), and (iii) partially hold, we extend on the largely qualitative experiments from the authors by introducing a quantitative metric to further support (iii), and new experiments and visual results for (i). Moreover, we investigate the use of different clustering algorithms and encoder architectures to further support (ii). We could not support (iv), given the limited extent of the original experiments. We conclude that, while some of the claims can be supported, further investigations and experiments could be of interest. We recognise the novelty of the work from the authors and hope that our work paves the way for clearer and more transparent approaches.
OmniEdit: Building Image Editing Generalist Models Through Specialist Supervision
Authors: Cong Wei, Zheyang Xiong, Weiming Ren, Xinrun Du, Ge Zhang, Wenhu Chen
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00

Instruction-guided image editing methods have demonstrated significant potential by training diffusion models on automatically synthesized or manually annotated image editing pairs. However, these methods remain far from practical, real-life applications. We identify three primary challenges contributing to this gap. Firstly, existing models have limited editing skills due to the biased synthesis process. Secondly, these methods are trained with datasets with a high volume of noise and artifacts. This is due to the application of simple filtering methods like CLIP-score. Thirdly, all these datasets are restricted to a single low resolution and fixed aspect ratio, limiting the versatility to handle real-world use cases. In this paper, we present \omniedit, which is an omnipotent editor to handle seven different image editing tasks with any aspect ratio seamlessly. Our contribution is in four folds: (1) \omniedit is trained by utilizing the supervision from seven different specialist models to ensure task coverage. (2) we utilize importance sampling based on the scores provided by large multimodal models (like GPT-4o) instead of CLIP-score to improve the data quality. (3) we propose a new editing architecture called EditNet to greatly boost the editing success rate, (4) we provide images with different aspect ratios to ensure that our model can handle any image in the wild. We have curated a test set containing images of different aspect ratios, accompanied by diverse instructions to cover different tasks. Both automatic evaluation and human evaluations demonstrate that \omniedit can significantly outperform all the existing models. Our code, dataset and model will be available at \url{https://tiger-ai-lab.github.io/OmniEdit/}
The Super Weight in Large Language Models
Authors: Mengxia Yu, De Wang, Qi Shan, Colorado Reed, Alvin Wan
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Quantization

Recent works have shown a surprising result: a small fraction of Large Language Model (LLM) parameter outliers are disproportionately important to the quality of the model. LLMs contain billions of parameters, so these small fractions, such as 0.01%, translate to hundreds of thousands of parameters. In this work, we present an even more surprising finding: Pruning as few as a single parameter can destroy an LLM's ability to generate text -- increasing perplexity by 3 orders of magnitude and reducing zero-shot accuracy to guessing. We propose a data-free method for identifying such parameters, termed super weights, using a single forward pass through the model. We additionally find that these super weights induce correspondingly rare and large activation outliers, termed super activations. When preserved with high precision, super activations can improve simple round-to-nearest quantization to become competitive with state-of-the-art methods. For weight quantization, we similarly find that by preserving the super weight and clipping other weight outliers, round-to-nearest quantization can scale to much larger block sizes than previously considered. To facilitate further research into super weights, we provide an index of super weight coordinates for common, openly available LLMs.
NatureLM-audio: an Audio-Language Foundation Model for Bioacoustics
Authors: David Robinson, Marius Miron, Masato Hagiwara, Olivier Pietquin
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Large language models (LLMs) prompted with text and audio represent the state of the art in various auditory tasks, including speech, music, and general audio, showing emergent abilities on unseen tasks. However, these capabilities have yet to be fully demonstrated in bioacoustics tasks, such as detecting animal vocalizations in large recordings, classifying rare and endangered species, and labeling context and behavior - tasks that are crucial for conservation, biodiversity monitoring, and the study of animal behavior. In this work, we present NatureLM-audio, the first audio-language foundation model specifically designed for bioacoustics. Our carefully curated training dataset comprises text-audio pairs spanning a diverse range of bioacoustics, speech, and music data, designed to address the challenges posed by limited annotated datasets in the field. We demonstrate successful transfer of learned representations from music and speech to bioacoustics, and our model shows promising generalization to unseen taxa and tasks. Importantly, we test NatureLM-audio on a novel benchmark (BEANS-Zero) and it sets the new state of the art (SotA) on several bioacoustics tasks, including zero-shot classification of unseen species. To advance bioacoustics research, we also open-source the code for generating training and benchmark data, as well as for training the model.
Gradual Fine-Tuning with Graph Routing for Multi-Source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation
Authors: Yao Ma, Samuel Louvan, Zhunxuan Wang
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Multi-Source Unsupervised Domain Adaptation, Natural Language Inference, Sentiment Analysis, Unsupervised Domain Adaptation

Multi-source unsupervised domain adaptation aims to leverage labeled data from multiple source domains for training a machine learning model to generalize well on a target domain without labels. Source domain selection plays a crucial role in determining the model's performance. It relies on the similarities amongst source and target domains. Nonetheless, existing work for source domain selection often involves heavyweight computational procedures, especially when dealing with numerous source domains and the need to identify the best ones from them. In this paper, we introduce a framework for gradual fine tuning (GFT) of machine learning models on multiple source domains. We represent multiple source domains as an undirected weighted graph. We then give a new generalization error bound for GFT along any path within the graph, which is used to determine the optimal path corresponding to the optimal training order. With this formulation, we introduce three lightweight graph-routing strategies which tend to minimize the error bound. Our best strategy improves $2.3\%$ of accuracy over the state-of-the-art on Natural Language Inference (NLI) task and achieves competitive performance on Sentiment Analysis (SA) task, especially a $3.9\%$ improvement on a more diverse subset of data we use for SA.
Gumbel Counterfactual Generation From Language Models
Authors: Shauli Ravfogel, Anej Svete, Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson, Ryan Cotterell
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Counterfactual Reasoning, Sentence

Understanding and manipulating the causal generation mechanisms in language models is essential for controlling their behavior. Previous work has primarily relied on techniques such as representation surgery -- e.g., model ablations or manipulation of linear subspaces tied to specific concepts -- to \emph{intervene} on these models. To understand the impact of interventions precisely, it is useful to examine counterfactuals -- e.g., how a given sentence would have appeared had it been generated by the model following a specific intervention. We highlight that counterfactual reasoning is conceptually distinct from interventions, as articulated in Pearl's causal hierarchy. Based on this observation, we propose a framework for generating true string counterfactuals by reformulating language models as a structural equation model using the Gumbel-max trick, which we called Gumbel counterfactual generation. This reformulation allows us to model the joint distribution over original strings and their counterfactuals resulting from the same instantiation of the sampling noise. We develop an algorithm based on hindsight Gumbel sampling that allows us to infer the latent noise variables and generate counterfactuals of observed strings. Our experiments demonstrate that the approach produces meaningful counterfactuals while at the same time showing that commonly used intervention techniques have considerable undesired side effects.
More Expressive Attention with Negative Weights
Authors: Ang Lv, Ruobing Xie, Shuaipeng Li, Jiayi Liao, Xingwu Sun, Zhanhui Kang, Di Wang, Rui Yan
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We propose a novel attention mechanism, named Cog Attention, that enables attention weights to be negative for enhanced expressiveness, which stems from two key factors: (1) Cog Attention enhances parameter flexibility. For example, unlike traditional softmax attention heads that use a static output-value (OV) matrix to delete or copy inputs that the heads attend to, Cog Attention naturally learns to use the sign of dynamic query-key (QK) inner products to represent these operations. This enables Cog Attention to perform multiple operations simultaneously within a single head. Meanwhile, Cog Attention's OV matrix can focus more on refinement or modification. (2) Cog Attention enhances the model's robustness against representational collapse by preventing the ``over-squashing'' of earlier tokens into later positions. We develop Transformer-like models which use Cog Attention as attention modules, including decoder-only models at various scales for language modeling and U-ViT diffusion models for image generation. Experiments show that models using Cog Attention exhibit superior performance compared to those employing traditional softmax attention modules. Our approach suggests a promising research direction for rethinking and breaking the entrenched constraints of traditional softmax attention, such as the requirement for non-negative weights.
Anytime Sequential Halving in Monte-Carlo Tree Search
Authors: Dominic Sagers, Mark H. M. Winands, Dennis J. N. J. Soemers
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Board Games

Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) typically uses multi-armed bandit (MAB) strategies designed to minimize cumulative regret, such as UCB1, as its selection strategy. However, in the root node of the search tree, it is more sensible to minimize simple regret. Previous work has proposed using Sequential Halving as selection strategy in the root node, as, in theory, it performs better with respect to simple regret. However, Sequential Halving requires a budget of iterations to be predetermined, which is often impractical. This paper proposes an anytime version of the algorithm, which can be halted at any arbitrary time and still return a satisfactory result, while being designed such that it approximates the behavior of Sequential Halving. Empirical results in synthetic MAB problems and ten different board games demonstrate that the algorithm's performance is competitive with Sequential Halving and UCB1 (and their analogues in MCTS).
A Domain-Agnostic Neurosymbolic Approach for Big Social Data Analysis: Evaluating Mental Health Sentiment on Social Media during COVID-19
Authors: Vedant Khandelwal, Manas Gaur, Ugur Kursuncu, Valerie Shalin, Amit Sheth
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Knowledge Graphs

Monitoring public sentiment via social media is potentially helpful during health crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. However, traditional frequency-based, data-driven neural network-based approaches can miss newly relevant content due to the evolving nature of language in a dynamically evolving environment. Human-curated symbolic knowledge sources, such as lexicons for standard language and slang terms, can potentially elevate social media signals in evolving language. We introduce a neurosymbolic method that integrates neural networks with symbolic knowledge sources, enhancing the detection and interpretation of mental health-related tweets relevant to COVID-19. Our method was evaluated using a corpus of large datasets (approximately 12 billion tweets, 2.5 million subreddit data, and 700k news articles) and multiple knowledge graphs. This method dynamically adapts to evolving language, outperforming purely data-driven models with an F1 score exceeding 92\%. This approach also showed faster adaptation to new data and lower computational demands than fine-tuning pre-trained large language models (LLMs). This study demonstrates the benefit of neurosymbolic methods in interpreting text in a dynamic environment for tasks such as health surveillance.
RoundTable: Investigating Group Decision-Making Mechanism in Multi-Agent Collaboration
Authors: Young-Min Cho, Raphael Shu, Nilaksh Das, Tamer Alkhouli, Yi-An Lai, Jason Cai, Monica Sunkara, Yi Zhang, Dan Roth
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Effective group decision-making is critical in Multi-Agent Systems (MAS). Yet, how different mechanisms for reaching consensus impact collaboration quality and efficiency remains understudied. We conduct a systematic study on group decision-making mechanisms in a decentralized setting. Through controlled experiments, we analyze how different voting rules affect decision quality and efficiency in a multi-round collaboration. Results reveal that majority voting often cause inefficient collaboration due to its strict acceptance criteria. At the extreme, unanimous voting gives 87% lower initial performance than the best-performing method. Our qualitative analysis of cross-agent communication shows that messages become longer and more repetitive over time: while message length increases by 84%, similarity to the previous round increases to 90%. Based on these insights, language-based early stopping methods make the performance 13% closer to oracle while reducing rounds by 50%. Our findings highlight the crucial role of group decision-making in optimizing MAS collaboration.
HierTOD: A Task-Oriented Dialogue System Driven by Hierarchical Goals
Authors: Lingbo Mo, Shun Jiang, Akash Maharaj, Bernard Hishamunda, Yunyao Li
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Dialogue Management, Management, Natural Language Understanding, Response Generation, slot-filling, Slot Filling

Task-Oriented Dialogue (TOD) systems assist users in completing tasks through natural language interactions, often relying on a single-layered workflow structure for slot-filling in public tasks, such as hotel bookings. However, in enterprise environments, which involve rich domain-specific knowledge, TOD systems face challenges due to task complexity and the lack of standardized documentation. In this work, we introduce HierTOD, an enterprise TOD system driven by hierarchical goals and can support composite workflows. By focusing on goal-driven interactions, our system serves a more proactive role, facilitating mixed-initiative dialogue and improving task completion. Equipped with components for natural language understanding, composite goal retriever, dialogue management, and response generation, backed by a well-organized data service with domain knowledge base and retrieval engine, HierTOD delivers efficient task assistance. Furthermore, our system implementation unifies two TOD paradigms: slot-filling for information collection and step-by-step guidance for task execution. Our human study demonstrates the effectiveness and helpfulness of HierTOD in performing both paradigms.
Variational Graph Contrastive Learning
Authors: Shifeng Xie, Jhony H. Giraldo
Date: 2024-11-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Graph representation learning (GRL) is a fundamental task in machine learning, aiming to encode high-dimensional graph-structured data into low-dimensional vectors. Self-supervised learning (SSL) methods are widely used in GRL because they can avoid expensive human annotation. In this work, we propose a novel Subgraph Gaussian Embedding Contrast (SGEC) method. Our approach introduces a subgraph Gaussian embedding module, which adaptively maps subgraphs to a structured Gaussian space, ensuring the preservation of graph characteristics while controlling the distribution of generated subgraphs. We employ optimal transport distances, including Wasserstein and Gromov-Wasserstein distances, to effectively measure the similarity between subgraphs, enhancing the robustness of the contrastive learning process. Extensive experiments across multiple benchmarks demonstrate that SGEC outperforms or presents competitive performance against state-of-the-art approaches. Our findings provide insights into the design of SSL methods for GRL, emphasizing the importance of the distribution of the generated contrastive pairs.