pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Does This Summary Answer My Question? Modeling Query-Focused Summary Readers with Rational Speech Acts
Authors: Cesare Spinoso-Di Piano, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
Date: 2024-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Query-focused Summarization, Text Generation

Query-focused summarization (QFS) is the task of generating a summary in response to a user-written query. Despite its user-oriented nature, there has been limited work in QFS in explicitly considering a user's understanding of a generated summary, potentially causing QFS systems to underperform at inference time. In this paper, we adapt the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework, a model of human communication, to explicitly model a reader's understanding of a query-focused summary and integrate it within the generation method of existing QFS systems. In particular, we introduce the answer reconstruction objective which approximates a reader's understanding of a summary by their ability to use it to reconstruct the answer to their initial query. Using this objective, we are able to re-rank candidate summaries generated by existing QFS systems and select summaries that better align with their corresponding query and reference summary. More generally, our study suggests that a simple and effective way of improving a language generation system designed for a user-centered task may be to explicitly incorporate its user requirements into the system's generation procedure.
Offline Handwritten Signature Verification Using a Stream-Based Approach
Authors: Kecia G. de Moura, Rafael M. O. Cruz, Robert Sabourin
Date: 2024-11-10 00:00:00

Handwritten Signature Verification (HSV) systems distinguish between genuine and forged signatures. Traditional HSV development involves a static batch configuration, constraining the system's ability to model signatures to the limited data available. Signatures exhibit high intra-class variability and are sensitive to various factors, including time and external influences, imparting them a dynamic nature. This paper investigates the signature learning process within a data stream context. We propose a novel HSV approach with an adaptive system that receives an infinite sequence of signatures and is updated over time. Experiments were carried out on GPDS Synthetic, CEDAR, and MCYT datasets. Results demonstrate the superior performance of the proposed method compared to standard approaches that use a Support Vector Machine as a classifier. Implementation of the method is available at https://github.com/kdMoura/stream_hsv.
Understanding the Role of Equivariance in Self-supervised Learning
Authors: Yifei Wang, Kaiwen Hu, Sharut Gupta, Ziyu Ye, Yisen Wang, Stefanie Jegelka
Date: 2024-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

Contrastive learning has been a leading paradigm for self-supervised learning, but it is widely observed that it comes at the price of sacrificing useful features (\eg colors) by being invariant to data augmentations. Given this limitation, there has been a surge of interest in equivariant self-supervised learning (E-SSL) that learns features to be augmentation-aware. However, even for the simplest rotation prediction method, there is a lack of rigorous understanding of why, when, and how E-SSL learns useful features for downstream tasks. To bridge this gap between practice and theory, we establish an information-theoretic perspective to understand the generalization ability of E-SSL. In particular, we identify a critical explaining-away effect in E-SSL that creates a synergy between the equivariant and classification tasks. This synergy effect encourages models to extract class-relevant features to improve its equivariant prediction, which, in turn, benefits downstream tasks requiring semantic features. Based on this perspective, we theoretically analyze the influence of data transformations and reveal several principles for practical designs of E-SSL. Our theory not only aligns well with existing E-SSL methods but also sheds light on new directions by exploring the benefits of model equivariance. We believe that a theoretically grounded understanding on the role of equivariance would inspire more principled and advanced designs in this field. Code is available at https://github.com/kaotty/Understanding-ESSL.
Barriers to Complexity-Theoretic Proofs that Achieving AGI Using Machine Learning is Intractable
Authors: Michael Guerzhoy
Date: 2024-11-10 00:00:00

A recent paper (van Rooij et al. 2024) claims to have proved that achieving human-like intelligence using learning from data is intractable in a complexity-theoretic sense. We identify that the proof relies on an unjustified assumption about the distribution of (input, output) pairs to the system. We briefly discuss that assumption in the context of two fundamental barriers to repairing the proof: the need to precisely define ``human-like," and the need to account for the fact that a particular machine learning system will have particular inductive biases that are key to the analysis.
LProtector: An LLM-driven Vulnerability Detection System
Authors: Ze Sheng, Fenghua Wu, Xiangwu Zuo, Chao Li, Yuxin Qiao, Lei Hang
Date: 2024-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Binary Classification, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Vulnerability Detection

This paper presents LProtector, an automated vulnerability detection system for C/C++ codebases driven by the large language model (LLM) GPT-4o and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). As software complexity grows, traditional methods face challenges in detecting vulnerabilities effectively. LProtector leverages GPT-4o's powerful code comprehension and generation capabilities to perform binary classification and identify vulnerabilities within target codebases. We conducted experiments on the Big-Vul dataset, showing that LProtector outperforms two state-of-the-art baselines in terms of F1 score, demonstrating the potential of integrating LLMs with vulnerability detection.
Hermes: A Large Language Model Framework on the Journey to Autonomous Networks
Authors: Fadhel Ayed, Ali Maatouk, Nicola Piovesan, Antonio De Domenico, Merouane Debbah, Zhi-Quan Luo
Date: 2024-11-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Management

The drive toward automating cellular network operations has grown with the increasing complexity of these systems. Despite advancements, full autonomy currently remains out of reach due to reliance on human intervention for modeling network behaviors and defining policies to meet target requirements. Network Digital Twins (NDTs) have shown promise in enhancing network intelligence, but the successful implementation of this technology is constrained by use case-specific architectures, limiting its role in advancing network autonomy. A more capable network intelligence, or "telecommunications brain", is needed to enable seamless, autonomous management of cellular network. Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as potential enablers for this vision but face challenges in network modeling, especially in reasoning and handling diverse data types. To address these gaps, we introduce Hermes, a chain of LLM agents that uses "blueprints" for constructing NDT instances through structured and explainable logical steps. Hermes allows automatic, reliable, and accurate network modeling of diverse use cases and configurations, thus marking progress toward fully autonomous network operations.
RL-Pruner: Structured Pruning Using Reinforcement Learning for CNN Compression and Acceleration
Authors: Boyao Wang, Volodymyr Kindratenko
Date: 2024-11-10 00:00:00

Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in recent years. Compressing these models not only reduces storage requirements, making deployment to edge devices feasible, but also accelerates inference, thereby reducing latency and computational costs. Structured pruning, which removes filters at the layer level, directly modifies the model architecture. This approach achieves a more compact architecture while maintaining target accuracy, ensuring that the compressed model retains good compatibility and hardware efficiency. Our method is based on a key observation: filters in different layers of a neural network have varying importance to the model's performance. When the number of filters to prune is fixed, the optimal pruning distribution across different layers is uneven to minimize performance loss. Layers that are more sensitive to pruning should account for a smaller proportion of the pruning distribution. To leverage this insight, we propose RL-Pruner, which uses reinforcement learning to learn the optimal pruning distribution. RL-Pruner can automatically extract dependencies between filters in the input model and perform pruning, without requiring model-specific pruning implementations. We conducted experiments on models such as GoogleNet, ResNet, and MobileNet, comparing our approach to other structured pruning methods to validate its effectiveness. Our code is available at https://github.com/Beryex/RLPruner-CNN.
Wild Narratives: Exploring the Effects of Animal Chatbots on Empathy and Positive Attitudes toward Animals
Authors: Jingshu Li, Aaditya Patwari, Yi-chieh Lee
Date: 2024-11-09 00:00:00

Rises in the number of animal abuse cases are reported around the world. While chatbots have been effective in influencing their users' perceptions and behaviors, little if any research has hitherto explored the design of chatbots that embody animal identities for the purpose of eliciting empathy toward animals. We therefore conducted a mixed-methods experiment to investigate how specific design cues in such chatbots can shape their users' perceptions of both the chatbots' identities and the type of animal they represent. Our findings indicate that such chatbots can significantly increase empathy, improve attitudes, and promote prosocial behavioral intentions toward animals, particularly when they incorporate emotional verbal expressions and authentic details of such animals' lives. These results expand our understanding of chatbots with non-human identities and highlight their potential for use in conservation initiatives, suggesting a promising avenue whereby technology could foster a more informed and empathetic society.
An Empirical Analysis on Spatial Reasoning Capabilities of Large Multimodal Models
Authors: Fatemeh Shiri, Xiao-Yu Guo, Mona Golestan Far, Xin Yu, Gholamreza Haffari, Yuan-Fang Li
Date: 2024-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection, Spatial Reasoning, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) have achieved strong performance across a range of vision and language tasks. However, their spatial reasoning capabilities are under-investigated. In this paper, we construct a novel VQA dataset, Spatial-MM, to comprehensively study LMMs' spatial understanding and reasoning capabilities. Our analyses on object-relationship and multi-hop reasoning reveal several important findings. Firstly, bounding boxes and scene graphs, even synthetic ones, can significantly enhance LMMs' spatial reasoning. Secondly, LMMs struggle more with questions posed from the human perspective than the camera perspective about the image. Thirdly, chain of thought (CoT) prompting does not improve model performance on complex multi-hop questions involving spatial relations. % Moreover, spatial reasoning steps are much less accurate than non-spatial ones across MLLMs. Lastly, our perturbation analysis on GQA-spatial reveals that LMMs are much stronger at basic object detection than complex spatial reasoning. We believe our benchmark dataset and in-depth analyses can spark further research on LMMs spatial reasoning. Spatial-MM benchmark is available at: https://github.com/FatemehShiri/Spatial-MM
Personalized News Recommendation System via LLM Embedding and Co-Occurrence Patterns
Authors: Zheng Li, Kai Zhange
Date: 2024-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, News Recommendation

In the past two years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved rapid development and demonstrated remarkable emerging capabilities. Concurrently, with powerful semantic understanding and reasoning capabilities, LLMs have significantly empowered the rapid advancement of the recommendation system field. Specifically, in news recommendation (NR), systems must comprehend and process a vast amount of clicked news text to infer the probability of candidate news clicks. This requirement exceeds the capabilities of traditional NR models but aligns well with the strengths of LLMs. In this paper, we propose a novel NR algorithm to reshape the news model via LLM Embedding and Co-Occurrence Pattern (LECOP). On one hand, we fintuned LLM by contrastive learning using large-scale datasets to encode news, which can fully explore the semantic information of news to thoroughly identify user preferences. On the other hand, we explored multiple co-occurrence patterns to mine collaborative information. Those patterns include news ID co-occurrence, Item-Item keywords co-occurrence and Intra-Item keywords co-occurrence. The keywords mentioned above are all generated by LLM. As far as we know, this is the first time that constructing such detailed Co-Occurrence Patterns via LLM to capture collaboration. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our proposed novel method
PointCG: Self-supervised Point Cloud Learning via Joint Completion and Generation
Authors: Yun Liu, Peng Li, Xuefeng Yan, Liangliang Nan, Bing Wang, Honghua Chen, Lina Gong, Wei Zhao, Mingqiang Wei
Date: 2024-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Image Generation

The core of self-supervised point cloud learning lies in setting up appropriate pretext tasks, to construct a pre-training framework that enables the encoder to perceive 3D objects effectively. In this paper, we integrate two prevalent methods, masked point modeling (MPM) and 3D-to-2D generation, as pretext tasks within a pre-training framework. We leverage the spatial awareness and precise supervision offered by these two methods to address their respective limitations: ambiguous supervision signals and insensitivity to geometric information. Specifically, the proposed framework, abbreviated as PointCG, consists of a Hidden Point Completion (HPC) module and an Arbitrary-view Image Generation (AIG) module. We first capture visible points from arbitrary views as inputs by removing hidden points. Then, HPC extracts representations of the inputs with an encoder and completes the entire shape with a decoder, while AIG is used to generate rendered images based on the visible points' representations. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of the proposed method over the baselines in various downstream tasks. Our code will be made available upon acceptance.
CGLearn: Consistent Gradient-Based Learning for Out-of-Distribution Generalization
Authors: Jawad Chowdhury, Gabriel Terejanu
Date: 2024-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Out-of-Distribution Generalization

Improving generalization and achieving highly predictive, robust machine learning models necessitates learning the underlying causal structure of the variables of interest. A prominent and effective method for this is learning invariant predictors across multiple environments. In this work, we introduce a simple yet powerful approach, CGLearn, which relies on the agreement of gradients across various environments. This agreement serves as a powerful indication of reliable features, while disagreement suggests less reliability due to potential differences in underlying causal mechanisms. Our proposed method demonstrates superior performance compared to state-of-the-art methods in both linear and nonlinear settings across various regression and classification tasks. CGLearn shows robust applicability even in the absence of separate environments by exploiting invariance across different subsamples of observational data. Comprehensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets highlight its effectiveness in diverse scenarios. Our findings underscore the importance of leveraging gradient agreement for learning causal invariance, providing a significant step forward in the field of robust machine learning. The source code of the linear and nonlinear implementation of CGLearn is open-source and available at: https://github.com/hasanjawad001/CGLearn.
CROPS: A Deployable Crop Management System Over All Possible State Availabilities
Authors: Jing Wu, Zhixin Lai, ShengJie Liu, Suiyao Chen, Ran Tao, Pan Zhao, Chuyuan Tao, Yikun Cheng, Naira Hovakimyan
Date: 2024-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Management, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Exploring the optimal management strategy for nitrogen and irrigation has a significant impact on crop yield, economic profit, and the environment. To tackle this optimization challenge, this paper introduces a deployable \textbf{CR}op Management system \textbf{O}ver all \textbf{P}ossible \textbf{S}tate availabilities (CROPS). CROPS employs a language model (LM) as a reinforcement learning (RL) agent to explore optimal management strategies within the Decision Support System for Agrotechnology Transfer (DSSAT) crop simulations. A distinguishing feature of this system is that the states used for decision-making are partially observed through random masking. Consequently, the RL agent is tasked with two primary objectives: optimizing management policies and inferring masked states. This approach significantly enhances the RL agent's robustness and adaptability across various real-world agricultural scenarios. Extensive experiments on maize crops in Florida, USA, and Zaragoza, Spain, validate the effectiveness of CROPS. Not only did CROPS achieve State-of-the-Art (SOTA) results across various evaluation metrics such as production, profit, and sustainability, but the trained management policies are also immediately deployable in over of ten millions of real-world contexts. Furthermore, the pre-trained policies possess a noise resilience property, which enables them to minimize potential sensor biases, ensuring robustness and generalizability. Finally, unlike previous methods, the strength of CROPS lies in its unified and elegant structure, which eliminates the need for pre-defined states or multi-stage training. These advancements highlight the potential of CROPS in revolutionizing agricultural practices.
A Picture is Worth A Thousand Numbers: Enabling LLMs Reason about Time Series via Visualization
Authors: Haoxin Liu, Chenghao Liu, B. Aditya Prakash
Date: 2024-11-09 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Time Series

Large language models (LLMs), with demonstrated reasoning abilities across multiple domains, are largely underexplored for time-series reasoning (TsR), which is ubiquitous in the real world. In this work, we propose TimerBed, the first comprehensive testbed for evaluating LLMs' TsR performance. Specifically, TimerBed includes stratified reasoning patterns with real-world tasks, comprehensive combinations of LLMs and reasoning strategies, and various supervised models as comparison anchors. We perform extensive experiments with TimerBed, test multiple current beliefs, and verify the initial failures of LLMs in TsR, evidenced by the ineffectiveness of zero shot (ZST) and performance degradation of few shot in-context learning (ICL). Further, we identify one possible root cause: the numerical modeling of data. To address this, we propose a prompt-based solution VL-Time, using visualization-modeled data and language-guided reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that Vl-Time enables multimodal LLMs to be non-trivial ZST and powerful ICL reasoners for time series, achieving about 140% average performance improvement and 99% average token costs reduction.
A Comprehensive Guide to Enhancing Antibiotic Discovery Using Machine Learning Derived Bio-computation
Authors: Khartik Uppalapati, Eeshan Dandamudi, S. Nick Ice, Gaurav Chandra, Kirsten Bischof, Christian L. Lorson, Kamal Singh
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery

Traditional drug discovery is a long, expensive, and complex process. Advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) are beginning to change this narrative. Here, we provide a comprehensive overview of different AI and ML tools that can be used to streamline and accelerate the drug discovery process. By using data sets to train ML algorithms, it is possible to discover drugs or drug-like compounds relatively quickly, and efficiently. Additionally, we address limitations in AI-based drug discovery and development, including the scarcity of high-quality data to train AI models and ethical considerations. The growing impact of AI on the pharmaceutical industry is also highlighted. Finally, we discuss how AI and ML can expedite the discovery of new antibiotics to combat the problem of worldwide antimicrobial resistance (AMR).
The Dark Patterns of Personalized Persuasion in Large Language Models: Exposing Persuasive Linguistic Features for Big Five Personality Traits in LLMs Responses
Authors: Wiktoria Mieleszczenko-Kowszewicz, Dawid Płudowski, Filip Kołodziejczyk, Jakub Świstak, Julian Sienkiewicz, Przemysław Biecek
Date: 2024-11-08 00:00:00

This study explores how the Large Language Models (LLMs) adjust linguistic features to create personalized persuasive outputs. While research showed that LLMs personalize outputs, a gap remains in understanding the linguistic features of their persuasive capabilities. We identified 13 linguistic features crucial for influencing personalities across different levels of the Big Five model of personality. We analyzed how prompts with personality trait information influenced the output of 19 LLMs across five model families. The findings show that models use more anxiety-related words for neuroticism, increase achievement-related words for conscientiousness, and employ fewer cognitive processes words for openness to experience. Some model families excel at adapting language for openness to experience, others for conscientiousness, while only one model adapts language for neuroticism. Our findings show how LLMs tailor responses based on personality cues in prompts, indicating their potential to create persuasive content affecting the mind and well-being of the recipients.