pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AI-Assisted Cervical Cancer Screening
Authors: Kanchan Poudel, Lisasha Poudel, Prabin Raj Shakya, Atit Poudel, Archana Shrestha, Bishesh Khanal
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00

Visual Inspection with Acetic Acid (VIA) remains the most feasible cervical cancer screening test in resource-constrained settings of low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), which are often performed screening camps or primary/community health centers by nurses instead of the preferred but unavailable expert Gynecologist. To address the highly subjective nature of the test, various handheld devices integrating cameras or smartphones have been recently explored to capture cervical images during VIA and aid decision-making via telemedicine or AI models. Most studies proposing AI models retrospectively use a relatively small number of already collected images from specific devices, digital cameras, or smartphones; the challenges and protocol for quality image acquisition during VIA in resource-constrained camp settings, challenges in getting gold standard, data imbalance, etc. are often overlooked. We present a novel approach and describe the end-to-end design process to build a robust smartphone-based AI-assisted system that does not require buying a separate integrated device: the proposed protocol for quality image acquisition in resource-constrained settings, dataset collected from 1,430 women during VIA performed by nurses in screening camps, preprocessing pipeline, and training and evaluation of a deep-learning-based classification model aimed to identify (pre)cancerous lesions. Our work shows that the readily available smartphones and a suitable protocol can capture the cervix images with the required details for the VIA test well; the deep-learning-based classification model provides promising results to assist nurses in VIA screening; and provides a direction for large-scale data collection and validation in resource-constrained settings.
Advancing COVID-19 Detection in 3D CT Scans
Authors: Qingqiu Li, Runtian Yuan, Junlin Hou, Jilan Xu, Yuejie Zhang, Rui Feng, Hao Chen
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00

To make a more accurate diagnosis of COVID-19, we propose a straightforward yet effective model. Firstly, we analyse the characteristics of 3D CT scans and remove the non-lung parts, facilitating the model to focus on lesion-related areas and reducing computational cost. We use ResNeSt50 as the strong feature extractor, initializing it with pretrained weights which have COVID-19-specific prior knowledge. Our model achieves a Macro F1 Score of 0.94 on the validation set of the 4th COV19D Competition Challenge $\mathrm{I}$, surpassing the baseline by 16%. This indicates its effectiveness in distinguishing between COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 cases, making it a robust method for COVID-19 detection.
OUCopula: Bi-Channel Multi-Label Copula-Enhanced Adapter-Based CNN for Myopia Screening Based on OU-UWF Images
Authors: Yang Li, Qiuyi Huang, Chong Zhong, Danjuan Yang, Meiyan Li, A. H. Welsh, Aiyi Liu, Bo Fu, Catherien C. Liu, Xingtao Zhou
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00

Myopia screening using cutting-edge ultra-widefield (UWF) fundus imaging is potentially significant for ophthalmic outcomes. Current multidisciplinary research between ophthalmology and deep learning (DL) concentrates primarily on disease classification and diagnosis using single-eye images, largely ignoring joint modeling and prediction for Oculus Uterque (OU, both eyes). Inspired by the complex relationships between OU and the high correlation between the (continuous) outcome labels (Spherical Equivalent and Axial Length), we propose a framework of copula-enhanced adapter convolutional neural network (CNN) learning with OU UWF fundus images (OUCopula) for joint prediction of multiple clinical scores. We design a novel bi-channel multi-label CNN that can (1) take bi-channel image inputs subject to both high correlation and heterogeneity (by sharing the same backbone network and employing adapters to parameterize the channel-wise discrepancy), and (2) incorporate correlation information between continuous output labels (using a copula). Solid experiments show that OUCopula achieves satisfactory performance in myopia score prediction compared to backbone models. Moreover, OUCopula can far exceed the performance of models constructed for single-eye inputs. Importantly, our study also hints at the potential extension of the bi-channel model to a multi-channel paradigm and the generalizability of OUCopula across various backbone CNNs.
Certified Robustness to Clean-Label Poisoning Using Diffusion Denoising
Authors: Sanghyun Hong, Nicholas Carlini, Alexey Kurakin
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Robustness, Denoising

We present a certified defense to clean-label poisoning attacks under $\ell_2$-norm. These attacks work by injecting a small number of poisoning samples (e.g., 1%) that contain bounded adversarial perturbations into the training data to induce a targeted misclassification of a test-time input. Inspired by the adversarial robustness achieved by $randomized$ $smoothing$, we show how an off-the-shelf diffusion denoising model can sanitize the tampered training data. We extensively test our defense against seven clean-label poisoning attacks in both $\ell_2$ and $\ell_{\infty}$-norms and reduce their attack success to 0-16% with only a negligible drop in the test accuracy. We compare our defense with existing countermeasures against clean-label poisoning, showing that the defense reduces the attack success the most and offers the best model utility. Our results highlight the need for future work on developing stronger clean-label attacks and using our certified yet practical defense as a strong baseline to evaluate these attacks.
From Pixels to Insights: A Survey on Automatic Chart Understanding in the Era of Large Foundation Models
Authors: Kung-Hsiang Huang, Hou Pong Chan, Yi R. Fung, Haoyi Qiu, Mingyang Zhou, Shafiq Joty, Shih-Fu Chang, Heng Ji
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Chart Understanding, Data Visualization

Data visualization in the form of charts plays a pivotal role in data analysis, offering critical insights and aiding in informed decision-making. Automatic chart understanding has witnessed significant advancements with the rise of large foundation models in recent years. Foundation models, such as large language models, have revolutionized various natural language processing tasks and are increasingly being applied to chart understanding tasks. This survey paper provides a comprehensive overview of the recent developments, challenges, and future directions in chart understanding within the context of these foundation models. We review fundamental building blocks crucial for studying chart understanding tasks. Additionally, we explore various tasks and their evaluation metrics and sources of both charts and textual inputs. Various modeling strategies are then examined, encompassing both classification-based and generation-based approaches, along with tool augmentation techniques that enhance chart understanding performance. Furthermore, we discuss the state-of-the-art performance of each task and discuss how we can improve the performance. Challenges and future directions are addressed, highlighting the importance of several topics, such as domain-specific charts, lack of efforts in developing evaluation metrics, and agent-oriented settings. This survey paper serves as a comprehensive resource for researchers and practitioners in the fields of natural language processing, computer vision, and data analysis, providing valuable insights and directions for future research in chart understanding leveraging large foundation models. The studies mentioned in this paper, along with emerging new research, will be continually updated at: https://github.com/khuangaf/Awesome-Chart-Understanding.
Embedded Named Entity Recognition using Probing Classifiers
Authors: Nicholas Popovič, Michael Färber
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Fact Checking, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, NER, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Text Generation, token-classification, Token Classification

Streaming text generation has become a common way of increasing the responsiveness of language model powered applications, such as chat assistants. At the same time, extracting semantic information from generated text is a useful tool for applications such as automated fact checking or retrieval augmented generation. Currently, this requires either separate models during inference, which increases computational cost, or destructive fine-tuning of the language model. Instead, we propose an approach called EMBER which enables streaming named entity recognition in decoder-only language models without fine-tuning them and while incurring minimal additional computational cost at inference time. Specifically, our experiments show that EMBER maintains high token generation rates, with only a negligible decrease in speed of around 1% compared to a 43.64% slowdown measured for a baseline. We make our code and data available online, including a toolkit for training, testing, and deploying efficient token classification models optimized for streaming text generation.
Revisiting The Classics: A Study on Identifying and Rectifying Gender Stereotypes in Rhymes and Poems
Authors: Aditya Narayan Sankaran, Vigneshwaran Shankaran, Sampath Lonka, Rajesh Sharma
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Rhymes and poems are a powerful medium for transmitting cultural norms and societal roles. However, the pervasive existence of gender stereotypes in these works perpetuates biased perceptions and limits the scope of individuals' identities. Past works have shown that stereotyping and prejudice emerge in early childhood, and developmental research on causal mechanisms is critical for understanding and controlling stereotyping and prejudice. This work contributes by gathering a dataset of rhymes and poems to identify gender stereotypes and propose a model with 97% accuracy to identify gender bias. Gender stereotypes were rectified using a Large Language Model (LLM) and its effectiveness was evaluated in a comparative survey against human educator rectifications. To summarize, this work highlights the pervasive nature of gender stereotypes in literary works and reveals the potential of LLMs to rectify gender stereotypes. This study raises awareness and promotes inclusivity within artistic expressions, making a significant contribution to the discourse on gender equality.
Construction of Hyper-Relational Knowledge Graphs Using Pre-Trained Large Language Models
Authors: Preetha Datta, Fedor Vitiugin, Anastasiia Chizhikova, Nitin Sawhney
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

Extracting hyper-relations is crucial for constructing comprehensive knowledge graphs, but there are limited supervised methods available for this task. To address this gap, we introduce a zero-shot prompt-based method using OpenAI's GPT-3.5 model for extracting hyper-relational knowledge from text. Comparing our model with a baseline, we achieved promising results, with a recall of 0.77. Although our precision is currently lower, a detailed analysis of the model outputs has uncovered potential pathways for future research in this area.
Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Models: In-Depth Analysis on the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus
Authors: Seungpil Lee, Woochang Sim, Donghyeon Shin, Wongyu Seo, Jiwon Park, Seokki Lee, Sanha Hwang, Sejin Kim, Sundong Kim
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC

The existing methods for evaluating the inference abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have been predominantly results-centric, making it challenging to assess the inference process comprehensively. We introduce a novel approach using the Abstraction and Reasoning Corpus (ARC) benchmark to evaluate the inference and contextual understanding abilities of LLMs in a process-centric manner, focusing on three key components from the Language of Thought Hypothesis (LoTH): Logical Coherence, Compositionality, and Productivity. Our carefully designed experiments reveal that while LLMs demonstrate some inference capabilities, they still significantly lag behind human-level reasoning in these three aspects. The main contribution of this paper lies in introducing the LoTH perspective, which provides a method for evaluating the reasoning process that conventional results-oriented approaches fail to capture, thereby offering new insights into the development of human-level reasoning in artificial intelligence systems.
Counting-Stars: A Multi-evidence, Position-aware, and Scalable Benchmark for Evaluating Long-Context Large Language Models
Authors: Mingyang Song, Mao Zheng, Xuan Luo
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Position, Retrieval

Despite recent efforts to develop large language models with robust long-context capabilities, the lack of long-context benchmarks means that relatively little is known about their performance. To alleviate this gap, in this paper, we propose \textbf{Counting-Stars}, a multi-evidence, position-aware, and scalable benchmark designed to evaluate the multi-evidence retrieval capabilities of long-context LLMs. \textbf{Counting-Stars} comprises two counting-based multiple pieces of evidence retrieval sub-tasks: searching and reasoning. Using Counting-Stars, we conduct experiments to evaluate several long-context LLMs, including GPT-4 Turbo, Gemini 1.5 Pro, Claude3 Opus, GLM-4, and Moonshot-v1. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that Gemini 1.5 Pro achieves the best overall results, while GPT-4 Turbo exhibits the most stable performance across various tasks. Furthermore, our analysis of these LLMs, which have been extended to handle long-context scenarios, indicates that significant room for improvement remains as the length of the input context and the complexity of the tasks increase.
Metaphor Understanding Challenge Dataset for LLMs
Authors: Xiaoyu Tong, Rochelle Choenni, Martha Lewis, Ekaterina Shutova
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00

Metaphors in natural language are a reflection of fundamental cognitive processes such as analogical reasoning and categorisation, and are deeply rooted in everyday communication. Metaphor understanding is therefore an essential task for large language models (LLMs). We release the Metaphor Understanding Challenge Dataset (MUNCH), designed to evaluate the metaphor understanding capabilities of LLMs. The dataset provides over 10k paraphrases for sentences containing metaphor use, as well as 1.5k instances containing inapt paraphrases. The inapt paraphrases were carefully selected to serve as control to determine whether the model indeed performs full metaphor interpretation or rather resorts to lexical similarity. All apt and inapt paraphrases were manually annotated. The metaphorical sentences cover natural metaphor uses across 4 genres (academic, news, fiction, and conversation), and they exhibit different levels of novelty. Experiments with LLaMA and GPT-3.5 demonstrate that MUNCH presents a challenging task for LLMs. The dataset is freely accessible at https://github.com/xiaoyuisrain/metaphor-understanding-challenge.
SSCAE -- Semantic, Syntactic, and Context-aware natural language Adversarial Examples generator
Authors: Javad Rafiei Asl, Mohammad H. Rafiei, Manar Alohaly, Daniel Takabi
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Language Modelling

Machine learning models are vulnerable to maliciously crafted Adversarial Examples (AEs). Training a machine learning model with AEs improves its robustness and stability against adversarial attacks. It is essential to develop models that produce high-quality AEs. Developing such models has been much slower in natural language processing (NLP) than in areas such as computer vision. This paper introduces a practical and efficient adversarial attack model called SSCAE for \textbf{S}emantic, \textbf{S}yntactic, and \textbf{C}ontext-aware natural language \textbf{AE}s generator. SSCAE identifies important words and uses a masked language model to generate an early set of substitutions. Next, two well-known language models are employed to evaluate the initial set in terms of semantic and syntactic characteristics. We introduce (1) a dynamic threshold to capture more efficient perturbations and (2) a local greedy search to generate high-quality AEs. As a black-box method, SSCAE generates humanly imperceptible and context-aware AEs that preserve semantic consistency and the source language's syntactical and grammatical requirements. The effectiveness and superiority of the proposed SSCAE model are illustrated with fifteen comparative experiments and extensive sensitivity analysis for parameter optimization. SSCAE outperforms the existing models in all experiments while maintaining a higher semantic consistency with a lower query number and a comparable perturbation rate.
Towards Understanding the Relationship between In-context Learning and Compositional Generalization
Authors: Sungjun Han, Sebastian Padó
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, In-Context Learning, Inductive Bias

According to the principle of compositional generalization, the meaning of a complex expression can be understood as a function of the meaning of its parts and of how they are combined. This principle is crucial for human language processing and also, arguably, for NLP models in the face of out-of-distribution data. However, many neural network models, including Transformers, have been shown to struggle with compositional generalization. In this paper, we hypothesize that forcing models to in-context learn can provide an inductive bias to promote compositional generalization. To test this hypothesis, we train a causal Transformer in a setting that renders ordinary learning very difficult: we present it with different orderings of the training instance and shuffle instance labels. This corresponds to training the model on all possible few-shot learning problems attainable from the dataset. The model can solve the task, however, by utilizing earlier examples to generalize to later ones (i.e. in-context learning). In evaluations on the datasets, SCAN, COGS, and GeoQuery, models trained in this manner indeed show improved compositional generalization. This indicates the usefulness of in-context learning problems as an inductive bias for generalization.
Ensuring Safe and High-Quality Outputs: A Guideline Library Approach for Language Models
Authors: Yi Luo, Zhenghao Lin, Yuhao Zhang, Jiashuo Sun, Chen Lin, Chengjin Xu, Xiangdong Su, Yelong Shen, Jian Guo, Yeyun Gong
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Response Generation, Retrieval

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but also present risks such as biased content generation and privacy issues. One of the current alignment techniques includes principle-driven integration, but it faces challenges arising from the imprecision of manually crafted rules and inadequate risk perception in models without safety training. To address these, we introduce Guide-Align, a two-stage approach. Initially, a safety-trained model identifies potential risks and formulates specific guidelines for various inputs, establishing a comprehensive library of guidelines and a model for input-guidelines retrieval. Subsequently, the retrieval model correlates new inputs with relevant guidelines, which guide LLMs in response generation to ensure safe and high-quality outputs, thereby aligning with human values. An additional optional stage involves fine-tuning a model with well-aligned datasets generated through the process implemented in the second stage. Our method customizes guidelines to accommodate diverse inputs, thereby enhancing the fine-grainedness and comprehensiveness of the guideline library. Furthermore, it incorporates safety expertise from a safety-trained LLM through a lightweight retrieval model. We evaluate our approach on three benchmarks, demonstrating significant improvements in LLM security and quality. Notably, our fine-tuned model, Labrador, even at 13 billion parameters, outperforms GPT-3.5-turbo and surpasses GPT-4 in alignment capabilities.
GPT-4 as Evaluator: Evaluating Large Language Models on Pest Management in Agriculture
Authors: Shanglong Yang, Zhipeng Yuan, Shunbao Li, Ruoling Peng, Kang Liu, Po Yang
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence (AI), the application of large language models (LLMs) in agriculture, particularly in pest management, remains nascent. We aimed to prove the feasibility by evaluating the content of the pest management advice generated by LLMs, including the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT) series from OpenAI and the FLAN series from Google. Considering the context-specific properties of agricultural advice, automatically measuring or quantifying the quality of text generated by LLMs becomes a significant challenge. We proposed an innovative approach, using GPT-4 as an evaluator, to score the generated content on Coherence, Logical Consistency, Fluency, Relevance, Comprehensibility, and Exhaustiveness. Additionally, we integrated an expert system based on crop threshold data as a baseline to obtain scores for Factual Accuracy on whether pests found in crop fields should take management action. Each model's score was weighted by percentage to obtain a final score. The results showed that GPT-3.4 and GPT-4 outperform the FLAN models in most evaluation categories. Furthermore, the use of instruction-based prompting containing domain-specific knowledge proved the feasibility of LLMs as an effective tool in agriculture, with an accuracy rate of 72%, demonstrating LLMs' effectiveness in providing pest management suggestions.
CO3: Low-resource Contrastive Co-training for Generative Conversational Query Rewrite
Authors: Yifei Yuan, Chen Shi, Runze Wang, Liyi Chen, Renjun Hu, Zengming Zhang, Feijun Jiang, Wai Lam
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Few-Shot Learning

Generative query rewrite generates reconstructed query rewrites using the conversation history while rely heavily on gold rewrite pairs that are expensive to obtain. Recently, few-shot learning is gaining increasing popularity for this task, whereas these methods are sensitive to the inherent noise due to limited data size. Besides, both attempts face performance degradation when there exists language style shift between training and testing cases. To this end, we study low-resource generative conversational query rewrite that is robust to both noise and language style shift. The core idea is to utilize massive unlabeled data to make further improvements via a contrastive co-training paradigm. Specifically, we co-train two dual models (namely Rewriter and Simplifier) such that each of them provides extra guidance through pseudo-labeling for enhancing the other in an iterative manner. We also leverage contrastive learning with data augmentation, which enables our model pay more attention on the truly valuable information than the noise. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of our model under both few-shot and zero-shot scenarios. We also verify the better generalization ability of our model when encountering language style shift.