pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Non-stationary Financial Risk Factors and Macroeconomic Vulnerability for the UK
Authors: Katalin Varga, Tibor Szendrei
Date: 2024-04-01 00:00:00

Tracking the build-up of financial vulnerabilities is a key component of financial stability policy. Due to the complexity of the financial system, this task is daunting, and there have been several proposals on how to manage this goal. One way to do this is by the creation of indices that act as a signal for the policy maker. While factor modelling in finance and economics has a rich history, most of the applications tend to focus on stationary factors. Nevertheless, financial stress (and in particular tail events) can exhibit a high degree of inertia. This paper advocates moving away from the stationary paradigm and instead proposes non-stationary factor models as measures of financial stress. Key advantage of a non-stationary factor model is that while some popular measures of financial stress describe the variance-covariance structure of the financial stress indicators, the new index can capture the tails of the distribution. To showcase this, we use the obtained factors as variables in a growth-at-risk exercise. This paper offers an overview of how to construct non-stationary dynamic factors of financial stress using the UK financial market as an example.
Temporal Graph Networks for Graph Anomaly Detection in Financial Networks
Authors: Yejin Kim, Youngbin Lee, Minyoung Choe, Sungju Oh, YongJae lee
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Fraud Detection, Graph Anomaly Detection, Graph Embedding, Graph Neural Network

This paper explores the utilization of Temporal Graph Networks (TGN) for financial anomaly detection, a pressing need in the era of fintech and digitized financial transactions. We present a comprehensive framework that leverages TGN, capable of capturing dynamic changes in edges within financial networks, for fraud detection. Our study compares TGN's performance against static Graph Neural Network (GNN) baselines, as well as cutting-edge hypergraph neural network baselines using DGraph dataset for a realistic financial context. Our results demonstrate that TGN significantly outperforms other models in terms of AUC metrics. This superior performance underlines TGN's potential as an effective tool for detecting financial fraud, showcasing its ability to adapt to the dynamic and complex nature of modern financial systems. We also experimented with various graph embedding modules within the TGN framework and compared the effectiveness of each module. In conclusion, we demonstrated that, even with variations within TGN, it is possible to achieve good performance in the anomaly detection task.
Missing Data Imputation With Granular Semantics and AI-driven Pipeline for Bankruptcy Prediction
Authors: Debarati Chakraborty, Ravi Ranjan
Date: 2024-03-15 00:00:00
Tasks: feature selection, Imputation, Missing Values, Prediction

This work focuses on designing a pipeline for the prediction of bankruptcy. The presence of missing values, high dimensional data, and highly class-imbalance databases are the major challenges in the said task. A new method for missing data imputation with granular semantics has been introduced here. The merits of granular computing have been explored here to define this method. The missing values have been predicted using the feature semantics and reliable observations in a low-dimensional space, in the granular space. The granules are formed around every missing entry, considering a few of the highly correlated features and most reliable closest observations to preserve the relevance and reliability, the context, of the database against the missing entries. An intergranular prediction is then carried out for the imputation within those contextual granules. That is, the contextual granules enable a small relevant fraction of the huge database to be used for imputation and overcome the need to access the entire database repetitively for each missing value. This method is then implemented and tested for the prediction of bankruptcy with the Polish Bankruptcy dataset. It provides an efficient solution for big and high-dimensional datasets even with large imputation rates. Then an AI-driven pipeline for bankruptcy prediction has been designed using the proposed granular semantic-based data filling method followed by the solutions to the issues like high dimensional dataset and high class-imbalance in the dataset. The rest of the pipeline consists of feature selection with the random forest for reducing dimensionality, data balancing with SMOTE, and prediction with six different popular classifiers including deep NN. All methods defined here have been experimentally verified with suitable comparative studies and proven to be effective on all the data sets captured over the five years.
Intelligent Learning Rate Distribution to reduce Catastrophic Forgetting in Transformers
Authors: Philip Kenneweg, Alexander Schulz, Sarah Schröder, Barbara Hammer
Date: 2024-03-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperparameter Optimization

Pretraining language models on large text corpora is a common practice in natural language processing. Fine-tuning of these models is then performed to achieve the best results on a variety of tasks. In this paper, we investigate the problem of catastrophic forgetting in transformer neural networks and question the common practice of fine-tuning with a flat learning rate for the entire network in this context. We perform a hyperparameter optimization process to find learning rate distributions that are better than a flat learning rate. We combine the learning rate distributions thus found and show that they generalize to better performance with respect to the problem of catastrophic forgetting. We validate these learning rate distributions with a variety of NLP benchmarks from the GLUE dataset.
A Review of Multi-Modal Large Language and Vision Models
Authors: Kilian Carolan, Laura Fennelly, Alan F. Smeaton
Date: 2024-03-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Prompt Engineering, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-to-Video Generation, Video Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently emerged as a focal point of research and application, driven by their unprecedented ability to understand and generate text with human-like quality. Even more recently, LLMs have been extended into multi-modal large language models (MM-LLMs) which extends their capabilities to deal with image, video and audio information, in addition to text. This opens up applications like text-to-video generation, image captioning, text-to-speech, and more and is achieved either by retro-fitting an LLM with multi-modal capabilities, or building a MM-LLM from scratch. This paper provides an extensive review of the current state of those LLMs with multi-modal capabilities as well as the very recent MM-LLMs. It covers the historical development of LLMs especially the advances enabled by transformer-based architectures like OpenAI's GPT series and Google's BERT, as well as the role of attention mechanisms in enhancing model performance. The paper includes coverage of the major and most important of the LLMs and MM-LLMs and also covers the techniques of model tuning, including fine-tuning and prompt engineering, which tailor pre-trained models to specific tasks or domains. Ethical considerations and challenges, such as data bias and model misuse, are also analysed to underscore the importance of responsible AI development and deployment. Finally, we discuss the implications of open-source versus proprietary models in AI research. Through this review, we provide insights into the transformative potential of MM-LLMs in various applications.
NeuroPrune: A Neuro-inspired Topological Sparse Training Algorithm for Large Language Models
Authors: Amit Dhurandhar, Tejaswini Pedapati, Ronny Luss, Soham Dan, Aurelie Lozano, Payel Das, Georgios Kollias
Date: 2024-02-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Translation, Natural Language Inference

Transformer-based Language Models have become ubiquitous in Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to their impressive performance on various tasks. However, expensive training as well as inference remains a significant impediment to their widespread applicability. While enforcing sparsity at various levels of the model architecture has found promise in addressing scaling and efficiency issues, there remains a disconnect between how sparsity affects network topology. Inspired by brain neuronal networks, we explore sparsity approaches through the lens of network topology. Specifically, we exploit mechanisms seen in biological networks, such as preferential attachment and redundant synapse pruning, and show that principled, model-agnostic sparsity approaches are performant and efficient across diverse NLP tasks, spanning both classification (such as natural language inference) and generation (summarization, machine translation), despite our sole objective not being optimizing performance. NeuroPrune is competitive with (or sometimes superior to) baselines on performance and can be up to $10$x faster in terms of training time for a given level of sparsity, simultaneously exhibiting measurable improvements in inference time in many cases.
Learning to Solve Job Shop Scheduling under Uncertainty
Authors: Guillaume Infantes, Stéphanie Roussel, Pierre Pereira, Antoine Jacquet, Emmanuel Benazera
Date: 2024-03-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Combinatorial Optimization, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Job Shop Scheduling, Scheduling

Job-Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) is a combinatorial optimization problem where tasks need to be scheduled on machines in order to minimize criteria such as makespan or delay. To address more realistic scenarios, we associate a probability distribution with the duration of each task. Our objective is to generate a robust schedule, i.e. that minimizes the average makespan. This paper introduces a new approach that leverages Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) techniques to search for robust solutions, emphasizing JSSPs with uncertain durations. Key contributions of this research include: (1) advancements in DRL applications to JSSPs, enhancing generalization and scalability, (2) a novel method for addressing JSSPs with uncertain durations. The Wheatley approach, which integrates Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and DRL, is made publicly available for further research and applications.
Generative AI Models for Different Steps in Architectural Design: A Literature Review
Authors: Chengyuan Li, Tianyu Zhang, Xusheng Du, Ye Zhang, Haoran Xie
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies have been significantly driven by models such as generative adversarial networks (GANs), variational autoencoders (VAEs), and denoising diffusion probabilistic models (DDPMs). Although architects recognize the potential of generative AI in design, personal barriers often restrict their access to the latest technological developments, thereby causing the application of generative AI in architectural design to lag behind. Therefore, it is essential to comprehend the principles and advancements of generative AI models and analyze their relevance in architecture applications. This paper first provides an overview of generative AI technologies, with a focus on probabilistic diffusion models (DDPMs), 3D generative models, and foundation models, highlighting their recent developments and main application scenarios. Then, the paper explains how the abovementioned models could be utilized in architecture. We subdivide the architectural design process into six steps and review related research projects in each step from 2020 to the present. Lastly, this paper discusses potential future directions for applying generative AI in the architectural design steps. This research can help architects quickly understand the development and latest progress of generative AI and contribute to the further development of intelligent architecture.
Bidirectional Multi-Scale Implicit Neural Representations for Image Deraining
Authors: Xiang Chen, Jinshan Pan, Jiangxin Dong
Date: 2024-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Image Reconstruction, Rain Removal

How to effectively explore multi-scale representations of rain streaks is important for image deraining. In contrast to existing Transformer-based methods that depend mostly on single-scale rain appearance, we develop an end-to-end multi-scale Transformer that leverages the potentially useful features in various scales to facilitate high-quality image reconstruction. To better explore the common degradation representations from spatially-varying rain streaks, we incorporate intra-scale implicit neural representations based on pixel coordinates with the degraded inputs in a closed-loop design, enabling the learned features to facilitate rain removal and improve the robustness of the model in complex scenarios. To ensure richer collaborative representation from different scales, we embed a simple yet effective inter-scale bidirectional feedback operation into our multi-scale Transformer by performing coarse-to-fine and fine-to-coarse information communication. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our approach, named as NeRD-Rain, performs favorably against the state-of-the-art ones on both synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/cschenxiang/NeRD-Rain.
Diffusion Deepfake
Authors: Chaitali Bhattacharyya, Hanxiao Wang, Feng Zhang, Sungho Kim, Xiatian Zhu
Date: 2024-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: DeepFake Detection, Diversity, Face Swapping, Model Optimization

Recent progress in generative AI, primarily through diffusion models, presents significant challenges for real-world deepfake detection. The increased realism in image details, diverse content, and widespread accessibility to the general public complicates the identification of these sophisticated deepfakes. Acknowledging the urgency to address the vulnerability of current deepfake detectors to this evolving threat, our paper introduces two extensive deepfake datasets generated by state-of-the-art diffusion models as other datasets are less diverse and low in quality. Our extensive experiments also showed that our dataset is more challenging compared to the other face deepfake datasets. Our strategic dataset creation not only challenge the deepfake detectors but also sets a new benchmark for more evaluation. Our comprehensive evaluation reveals the struggle of existing detection methods, often optimized for specific image domains and manipulations, to effectively adapt to the intricate nature of diffusion deepfakes, limiting their practical utility. To address this critical issue, we investigate the impact of enhancing training data diversity on representative detection methods. This involves expanding the diversity of both manipulation techniques and image domains. Our findings underscore that increasing training data diversity results in improved generalizability. Moreover, we propose a novel momentum difficulty boosting strategy to tackle the additional challenge posed by training data heterogeneity. This strategy dynamically assigns appropriate sample weights based on learning difficulty, enhancing the model's adaptability to both easy and challenging samples. Extensive experiments on both existing and newly proposed benchmarks demonstrate that our model optimization approach surpasses prior alternatives significantly.
Learning Temporal Cues by Predicting Objects Move for Multi-camera 3D Object Detection
Authors: Seokha Moon, Hongbeen Park, Jungphil Kwon, Jaekoo Lee, Jinkyu Kim
Date: 2024-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, Autonomous Driving, object-detection, Object Detection

In autonomous driving and robotics, there is a growing interest in utilizing short-term historical data to enhance multi-camera 3D object detection, leveraging the continuous and correlated nature of input video streams. Recent work has focused on spatially aligning BEV-based features over timesteps. However, this is often limited as its gain does not scale well with long-term past observations. To address this, we advocate for supervising a model to predict objects' poses given past observations, thus explicitly guiding to learn objects' temporal cues. To this end, we propose a model called DAP (Detection After Prediction), consisting of a two-branch network: (i) a branch responsible for forecasting the current objects' poses given past observations and (ii) another branch that detects objects based on the current and past observations. The features predicting the current objects from branch (i) is fused into branch (ii) to transfer predictive knowledge. We conduct extensive experiments with the large-scale nuScenes datasets, and we observe that utilizing such predictive information significantly improves the overall detection performance. Our model can be used plug-and-play, showing consistent performance gain.
TSCM: A Teacher-Student Model for Vision Place Recognition Using Cross-Metric Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Yehui Shen, Mingmin Liu, Huimin Lu, Xieyuanli Chen
Date: 2024-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Visual Place Recognition

Visual place recognition (VPR) plays a pivotal role in autonomous exploration and navigation of mobile robots within complex outdoor environments. While cost-effective and easily deployed, camera sensors are sensitive to lighting and weather changes, and even slight image alterations can greatly affect VPR efficiency and precision. Existing methods overcome this by exploiting powerful yet large networks, leading to significant consumption of computational resources. In this paper, we propose a high-performance teacher and lightweight student distillation framework called TSCM. It exploits our devised cross-metric knowledge distillation to narrow the performance gap between the teacher and student models, maintaining superior performance while enabling minimal computational load during deployment. We conduct comprehensive evaluations on large-scale datasets, namely Pittsburgh30k and Pittsburgh250k. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our method over baseline models in terms of recognition accuracy and model parameter efficiency. Moreover, our ablation studies show that the proposed knowledge distillation technique surpasses other counterparts. The code of our method has been released at https://github.com/nubot-nudt/TSCM.
Language Model Guided Interpretable Video Action Reasoning
Authors: Ning Wang, Guangming Zhu, HS Li, Liang Zhang, Syed Afaq Ali Shah, Mohammed Bennamoun
Date: 2024-04-02 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Action Recognition, Decision Making, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Logical Reasoning, model, Temporal Action Localization

While neural networks have excelled in video action recognition tasks, their black-box nature often obscures the understanding of their decision-making processes. Recent approaches used inherently interpretable models to analyze video actions in a manner akin to human reasoning. These models, however, usually fall short in performance compared to their black-box counterparts. In this work, we present a new framework named Language-guided Interpretable Action Recognition framework (LaIAR). LaIAR leverages knowledge from language models to enhance both the recognition capabilities and the interpretability of video models. In essence, we redefine the problem of understanding video model decisions as a task of aligning video and language models. Using the logical reasoning captured by the language model, we steer the training of the video model. This integrated approach not only improves the video model's adaptability to different domains but also boosts its overall performance. Extensive experiments on two complex video action datasets, Charades & CAD-120, validates the improved performance and interpretability of our LaIAR framework. The code of LaIAR is available at https://github.com/NingWang2049/LaIAR.
LR-FPN: Enhancing Remote Sensing Object Detection with Location Refined Feature Pyramid Network
Authors: Hanqian Li, Ruinan Zhang, Ye Pan, Junchi Ren, Fei Shen
Date: 2024-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Remote sensing target detection aims to identify and locate critical targets within remote sensing images, finding extensive applications in agriculture and urban planning. Feature pyramid networks (FPNs) are commonly used to extract multi-scale features. However, existing FPNs often overlook extracting low-level positional information and fine-grained context interaction. To address this, we propose a novel location refined feature pyramid network (LR-FPN) to enhance the extraction of shallow positional information and facilitate fine-grained context interaction. The LR-FPN consists of two primary modules: the shallow position information extraction module (SPIEM) and the contextual interaction module (CIM). Specifically, SPIEM first maximizes the retention of solid location information of the target by simultaneously extracting positional and saliency information from the low-level feature map. Subsequently, CIM injects this robust location information into different layers of the original FPN through spatial and channel interaction, explicitly enhancing the object area. Moreover, in spatial interaction, we introduce a simple local and non-local interaction strategy to learn and retain the saliency information of the object. Lastly, the LR-FPN can be readily integrated into common object detection frameworks to improve performance significantly. Extensive experiments on two large-scale remote sensing datasets (i.e., DOTAV1.0 and HRSC2016) demonstrate that the proposed LR-FPN is superior to state-of-the-art object detection approaches. Our code and models will be publicly available.
EDTalk: Efficient Disentanglement for Emotional Talking Head Synthesis
Authors: Shuai Tan, Bin Ji, Mengxiao Bi, Ye Pan
Date: 2024-04-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Disentanglement, Talking Head Generation

Achieving disentangled control over multiple facial motions and accommodating diverse input modalities greatly enhances the application and entertainment of the talking head generation. This necessitates a deep exploration of the decoupling space for facial features, ensuring that they a) operate independently without mutual interference and b) can be preserved to share with different modal input, both aspects often neglected in existing methods. To address this gap, this paper proposes a novel Efficient Disentanglement framework for Talking head generation (EDTalk). Our framework enables individual manipulation of mouth shape, head pose, and emotional expression, conditioned on video or audio inputs. Specifically, we employ three lightweight modules to decompose the facial dynamics into three distinct latent spaces representing mouth, pose, and expression, respectively. Each space is characterized by a set of learnable bases whose linear combinations define specific motions. To ensure independence and accelerate training, we enforce orthogonality among bases and devise an efficient training strategy to allocate motion responsibilities to each space without relying on external knowledge. The learned bases are then stored in corresponding banks, enabling shared visual priors with audio input. Furthermore, considering the properties of each space, we propose an Audio-to-Motion module for audio-driven talking head synthesis. Experiments are conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness of EDTalk. We recommend watching the project website: https://tanshuai0219.github.io/EDTalk/