pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
LLM-Based Offline Learning for Embodied Agents via Consistency-Guided Reward Ensemble
Authors: Yujeong Lee, Sangwoo Shin, Wei-Jin Park, Honguk Woo
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Offline RL, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Employing large language models (LLMs) to enable embodied agents has become popular, yet it presents several limitations in practice. In this work, rather than using LLMs directly as agents, we explore their use as tools for embodied agent learning. Specifically, to train separate agents via offline reinforcement learning (RL), an LLM is used to provide dense reward feedback on individual actions in training datasets. In doing so, we present a consistency-guided reward ensemble framework (CoREN), designed for tackling difficulties in grounding LLM-generated estimates to the target environment domain. The framework employs an adaptive ensemble of spatio-temporally consistent rewards to derive domain-grounded rewards in the training datasets, thus enabling effective offline learning of embodied agents in different environment domains. Experiments with the VirtualHome benchmark demonstrate that CoREN significantly outperforms other offline RL agents, and it also achieves comparable performance to state-of-the-art LLM-based agents with 8B parameters, despite CoREN having only 117M parameters for the agent policy network and using LLMs only for training.
DOGE: Towards Versatile Visual Document Grounding and Referring
Authors: Yinan Zhou, Yuxin Chen, Haokun Lin, Shuyu Yang, Li Zhu, Zhongang Qi, Chen Ma, Ying Shan
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: document understanding

In recent years, Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have increasingly emphasized grounding and referring capabilities to achieve detailed understanding and flexible user interaction. However, in the realm of visual document understanding, these capabilities lag behind due to the scarcity of fine-grained datasets and comprehensive benchmarks. To fill this gap, we propose the DOcument Grounding and Eferring data engine (DOGE-Engine), which produces two types of high-quality fine-grained document data: multi-granular parsing data for enhancing fundamental text localization and recognition capabilities; and instruction-tuning data to activate MLLM's grounding and referring capabilities during dialogue and reasoning. Additionally, using our engine, we construct DOGE-Bench, which encompasses 7 grounding and referring tasks across 3 document types (chart, poster, PDF document), providing comprehensive evaluations for fine-grained document understanding. Furthermore, leveraging the data generated by our engine, we develop a strong baseline model, DOGE. This pioneering MLLM is capable of accurately referring and grounding texts at multiple granularities within document images. Our code, data, and model will be open-sourced for community development.
Advancing Content Moderation: Evaluating Large Language Models for Detecting Sensitive Content Across Text, Images, and Videos
Authors: Nouar AlDahoul, Myles Joshua Toledo Tan, Harishwar Reddy Kasireddy, Yasir Zaki
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

The widespread dissemination of hate speech, harassment, harmful and sexual content, and violence across websites and media platforms presents substantial challenges and provokes widespread concern among different sectors of society. Governments, educators, and parents are often at odds with media platforms about how to regulate, control, and limit the spread of such content. Technologies for detecting and censoring the media contents are a key solution to addressing these challenges. Techniques from natural language processing and computer vision have been used widely to automatically identify and filter out sensitive content such as offensive languages, violence, nudity, and addiction in both text, images, and videos, enabling platforms to enforce content policies at scale. However, existing methods still have limitations in achieving high detection accuracy with fewer false positives and false negatives. Therefore, more sophisticated algorithms for understanding the context of both text and image may open rooms for improvement in content censorship to build a more efficient censorship system. In this paper, we evaluate existing LLM-based content moderation solutions such as OpenAI moderation model and Llama-Guard3 and study their capabilities to detect sensitive contents. Additionally, we explore recent LLMs such as GPT, Gemini, and Llama in identifying inappropriate contents across media outlets. Various textual and visual datasets like X tweets, Amazon reviews, news articles, human photos, cartoons, sketches, and violence videos have been utilized for evaluation and comparison. The results demonstrate that LLMs outperform traditional techniques by achieving higher accuracy and lower false positive and false negative rates. This highlights the potential to integrate LLMs into websites, social media platforms, and video-sharing services for regulatory and content moderation purposes.
Contrastive CFG: Improving CFG in Diffusion Models by Contrasting Positive and Negative Concepts
Authors: Jinho Chang, Hyungjin Chung, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

As Classifier-Free Guidance (CFG) has proven effective in conditional diffusion model sampling for improved condition alignment, many applications use a negated CFG term to filter out unwanted features from samples. However, simply negating CFG guidance creates an inverted probability distribution, often distorting samples away from the marginal distribution. Inspired by recent advances in conditional diffusion models for inverse problems, here we present a novel method to enhance negative CFG guidance using contrastive loss. Specifically, our guidance term aligns or repels the denoising direction based on the given condition through contrastive loss, achieving a nearly identical guiding direction to traditional CFG for positive guidance while overcoming the limitations of existing negative guidance methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach effectively removes undesirable concepts while maintaining sample quality across diverse scenarios, from simple class conditions to complex and overlapping text prompts.
Path-RAG: Knowledge-Guided Key Region Retrieval for Open-ended Pathology Visual Question Answering
Authors: Awais Naeem, TianHao Li, Huang-Ru Liao, Jiawei Xu, Aby M. Mathew, Zehao Zhu, Zhen Tan, Ajay Kumar Jaiswal, Raffi A. Salibian, Ziniu Hu, Tianlong Chen, Ying Ding
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Prognosis, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Visual Question Answering, Visual Question Answering (VQA)

Accurate diagnosis and prognosis assisted by pathology images are essential for cancer treatment selection and planning. Despite the recent trend of adopting deep-learning approaches for analyzing complex pathology images, they fall short as they often overlook the domain-expert understanding of tissue structure and cell composition. In this work, we focus on a challenging Open-ended Pathology VQA (PathVQA-Open) task and propose a novel framework named Path-RAG, which leverages HistoCartography to retrieve relevant domain knowledge from pathology images and significantly improves performance on PathVQA-Open. Admitting the complexity of pathology image analysis, Path-RAG adopts a human-centered AI approach by retrieving domain knowledge using HistoCartography to select the relevant patches from pathology images. Our experiments suggest that domain guidance can significantly boost the accuracy of LLaVA-Med from 38% to 47%, with a notable gain of 28% for H&E-stained pathology images in the PathVQA-Open dataset. For longer-form question and answer pairs, our model consistently achieves significant improvements of 32.5% in ARCH-Open PubMed and 30.6% in ARCH-Open Books on H\&E images. Our code and dataset is available here (https://github.com/embedded-robotics/path-rag).
Creative Agents: Simulating the Systems Model of Creativity with Generative Agents
Authors: Naomi Imasato, Kazuki Miyazawa, Takayuki Nagai, Takato Horii
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00

With the growing popularity of generative AI for images, video, and music, we witnessed models rapidly improve in quality and performance. However, not much attention is paid towards enabling AI's ability to "be creative". In this study, we implemented and simulated the systems model of creativity (proposed by Csikszentmihalyi) using virtual agents utilizing large language models (LLMs) and text prompts. For comparison, the simulations were conducted with the "virtual artists" being: 1)isolated and 2)placed in a multi-agent system. Both scenarios were compared by analyzing the variations and overall "creativity" in the generated artifacts (measured via a user study and LLM). Our results suggest that the generative agents may perform better in the framework of the systems model of creativity.
Graph Structure Learning with Bi-level Optimization
Authors: Nan Yin
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph structure learning

Currently, most Graph Structure Learning (GSL) methods, as a means of learning graph structure, improve the robustness of GNN merely from a local view by considering the local information related to each edge and indiscriminately applying the mechanism across edges, which may suffer from the local structure heterogeneity of the graph (\ie the uneven distribution of inter-class connections over nodes). To overcome the cons, we extract the graph structure as a learnable parameter and jointly learn the structure and common parameters of GNN from the global view. Excitingly, the common parameters contain the global information for nodes features mapping, which is also crucial for structure optimization (\ie optimizing the structure relies on global mapping information). Mathematically, we apply a generic structure extractor to abstract the graph structure and transform GNNs in the form of learning structure and common parameters. Then, we model the learning process as a novel bi-level optimization, \ie \textit{Generic Structure Extraction with Bi-level Optimization for Graph Structure Learning (GSEBO)}, which optimizes GNN parameters in the upper level to obtain the global mapping information and graph structure is optimized in the lower level with the global information learned from the upper level. We instantiate the proposed GSEBO on classical GNNs and compare it with the state-of-the-art GSL methods. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of the proposed GSEBO on four real-world datasets.
ThreatModeling-LLM: Automating Threat Modeling using Large Language Models for Banking System
Authors: Tingmin Wu, Shuiqiao Yang, Shigang Liu, David Nguyen, Seung Jang, Alsharif Abuadbba
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering

Threat modeling is a crucial component of cybersecurity, particularly for industries such as banking, where the security of financial data is paramount. Traditional threat modeling approaches require expert intervention and manual effort, often leading to inefficiencies and human error. The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) offers a promising avenue for automating these processes, enhancing both efficiency and efficacy. However, this transition is not straightforward due to three main challenges: (1) the lack of publicly available, domain-specific datasets, (2) the need for tailored models to handle complex banking system architectures, and (3) the requirement for real-time, adaptive mitigation strategies that align with compliance standards like NIST 800-53. In this paper, we introduce ThreatModeling-LLM, a novel and adaptable framework that automates threat modeling for banking systems using LLMs. ThreatModeling-LLM operates in three stages: 1) dataset creation, 2) prompt engineering and 3) model fine-tuning. We first generate a benchmark dataset using Microsoft Threat Modeling Tool (TMT). Then, we apply Chain of Thought (CoT) and Optimization by PROmpting (OPRO) on the pre-trained LLMs to optimize the initial prompt. Lastly, we fine-tune the LLM using Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) based on the benchmark dataset and the optimized prompt to improve the threat identification and mitigation generation capabilities of pre-trained LLMs.
Free$^2$Guide: Gradient-Free Path Integral Control for Enhancing Text-to-Video Generation with Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: JaeMin Kim, Bryan S Kim, Jong Chul Ye
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL), Text-to-Video Generation, Video Generation

Diffusion models have achieved impressive results in generative tasks like text-to-image (T2I) and text-to-video (T2V) synthesis. However, achieving accurate text alignment in T2V generation remains challenging due to the complex temporal dependency across frames. Existing reinforcement learning (RL)-based approaches to enhance text alignment often require differentiable reward functions or are constrained to limited prompts, hindering their scalability and applicability. In this paper, we propose Free$^2$Guide, a novel gradient-free framework for aligning generated videos with text prompts without requiring additional model training. Leveraging principles from path integral control, Free$^2$Guide approximates guidance for diffusion models using non-differentiable reward functions, thereby enabling the integration of powerful black-box Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) as reward model. Additionally, our framework supports the flexible ensembling of multiple reward models, including large-scale image-based models, to synergistically enhance alignment without incurring substantial computational overhead. We demonstrate that Free$^2$Guide significantly improves text alignment across various dimensions and enhances the overall quality of generated videos.
g3D-LF: Generalizable 3D-Language Feature Fields for Embodied Tasks
Authors: Zihan Wang, Gim Hee Lee
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Question Answering, Vision and Language Navigation

We introduce Generalizable 3D-Language Feature Fields (g3D-LF), a 3D representation model pre-trained on large-scale 3D-language dataset for embodied tasks. Our g3D-LF processes posed RGB-D images from agents to encode feature fields for: 1) Novel view representation predictions from any position in the 3D scene; 2) Generations of BEV maps centered on the agent; 3) Querying targets using multi-granularity language within the above-mentioned representations. Our representation can be generalized to unseen environments, enabling real-time construction and dynamic updates. By volume rendering latent features along sampled rays and integrating semantic and spatial relationships through multiscale encoders, our g3D-LF produces representations at different scales and perspectives, aligned with multi-granularity language, via multi-level contrastive learning. Furthermore, we prepare a large-scale 3D-language dataset to align the representations of the feature fields with language. Extensive experiments on Vision-and-Language Navigation under both Panorama and Monocular settings, Zero-shot Object Navigation, and Situated Question Answering tasks highlight the significant advantages and effectiveness of our g3D-LF for embodied tasks.
Can a Single Tree Outperform an Entire Forest?
Authors: Qiangqiang Mao, Yankai Cao
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00

The prevailing mindset is that a single decision tree underperforms classic random forests in testing accuracy, despite its advantages in interpretability and lightweight structure. This study challenges such a mindset by significantly improving the testing accuracy of an oblique regression tree through our gradient-based entire tree optimization framework, making its performance comparable to the classic random forest. Our approach reformulates tree training as a differentiable unconstrained optimization task, employing a scaled sigmoid approximation strategy. To ameliorate numerical instability, we propose an algorithmic scheme that solves a sequence of increasingly accurate approximations. Additionally, a subtree polish strategy is implemented to reduce approximation errors accumulated across the tree. Extensive experiments on 16 datasets demonstrate that our optimized tree outperforms the classic random forest by an average of $2.03\%$ improvements in testing accuracy.
SatVision-TOA: A Geospatial Foundation Model for Coarse-Resolution All-Sky Remote Sensing Imagery
Authors: Caleb S. Spradlin, Jordan A. Caraballo-Vega, Jian Li, Mark L. Carroll, Jie Gong, Paul M. Montesano
Date: 2024-11-26 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Cloud Detection, Self-Supervised Learning

Foundation models have the potential to transform the landscape of remote sensing (RS) data analysis by enabling large computer vision models to be pre-trained on vast amounts of remote sensing data. These models can then be fine-tuned with small amounts of labeled training and applied to a variety of applications. Most existing foundation models are designed for high spatial resolution, cloud-free satellite imagery or photos, limiting their applicability in scenarios that require frequent temporal monitoring or broad spectral profiles. As a result, foundation models trained solely on cloud-free images have limited utility for applications that involve atmospheric variables or require atmospheric corrections. We introduce SatVision-TOA, a novel foundation model pre-trained on 14-band MODIS L1B Top-Of-Atmosphere (TOA) radiance imagery, addressing the need for models pre-trained to handle moderate- and coarse-resolution all-sky remote sensing data. The SatVision-TOA model is pre-trained using a Masked-Image-Modeling (MIM) framework and the SwinV2 architecture, and learns detailed contextual representations through self-supervised learning without the need for labels. It is a 3 billion parameter model that is trained on 100 million images. To our knowledge this is the largest foundation model trained solely on satellite RS imagery. Results show that SatVision-TOA achieves superior performance over baseline methods on downstream tasks such as 3D cloud retrieval. Notably, the model achieves a mean intersection over union (mIOU) of 0.46, a substantial improvement over the baseline mIOU of 0.22. Additionally, the rate of false negative results in the fine-tuning task were reduced by over 50% compared to the baseline. Our work advances pre-trained vision modeling for multispectral RS by learning from a variety of atmospheric and aerosol conditions to improve cloud and land surface monitoring.
Teaching Smaller Language Models To Generalise To Unseen Compositional Questions (Full Thesis)
Authors: Tim Hartill
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Pretrained large Language Models (LLMs) are able to answer questions that are unlikely to have been encountered during training. However a diversity of potential applications exist in the broad domain of reasoning systems and considerations such as latency, cost, available compute resource and internet connectivity are relevant in determining an appropriate approach. We consider the setting where some local compute capacity is available at inference time but internet connectivity is not. Similar to a general-purpose LLM, we assume that our much smaller Reasoning Models may be asked arbitrary questions from unknown distributions, so we focus on evaluation in an unseen setting. We train our models to answer diverse questions by instilling an ability to reason over a retrieved context. We acquire context from two knowledge sources; a Wikipedia corpus queried using a multi-hop dense retrieval system with novel extensions, and from rationales generated from a larger Language Model optimised to run in a lower resource environment. Our main contributions: We propose novel methods to show that our model is capable of answering contextualised questions without memorisation. We establish a comprehensive set of baseline results on unseen evaluation datasets. We show that the addition of novel retrieval-augmented training datasets (RATD) to the training regime of the Reasoning Model significantly improves results. We demonstrate further significant improvement through the application of methods for combining knowledge from two sources. The first method (RR) involves training a novel Rationale Ranking model to score both generated rationales and retrieved contexts with respect to relevance and truthfulness. We use the scores to derive combined contexts. We also show that utilising the RATD datasets enables our model to become proficient at utilising combined noisy contexts.
ExpTest: Automating Learning Rate Searching and Tuning with Insights from Linearized Neural Networks
Authors: Zan Chaudhry, Naoko Mizuno
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

Hyperparameter tuning remains a significant challenge for the training of deep neural networks (DNNs), requiring manual and/or time-intensive grid searches, increasing resource costs and presenting a barrier to the democratization of machine learning. The global initial learning rate for DNN training is particularly important. Several techniques have been proposed for automated learning rate tuning during training; however, they still require manual searching for the global initial learning rate. Though methods exist that do not require this initial selection, they suffer from poor performance. Here, we present ExpTest, a sophisticated method for initial learning rate searching and subsequent learning rate tuning for the training of DNNs. ExpTest draws on insights from linearized neural networks and the form of the loss curve, which we treat as a real-time signal upon which we perform hypothesis testing. We mathematically justify ExpTest and provide empirical support. ExpTest requires minimal overhead, is robust to hyperparameter choice, and achieves state-of-the-art performance on a variety of tasks and architectures, without initial learning rate selection or learning rate scheduling.
Clustering Time Series Data with Gaussian Mixture Embeddings in a Graph Autoencoder Framework
Authors: Amirabbas Afzali, Hesam Hosseini, Mohmmadamin Mirzai, Arash Amini
Date: 2024-11-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Management, Portfolio Optimization, Time Series, Time Series Clustering

Time series data analysis is prevalent across various domains, including finance, healthcare, and environmental monitoring. Traditional time series clustering methods often struggle to capture the complex temporal dependencies inherent in such data. In this paper, we propose the Variational Mixture Graph Autoencoder (VMGAE), a graph-based approach for time series clustering that leverages the structural advantages of graphs to capture enriched data relationships and produces Gaussian mixture embeddings for improved separability. Comparisons with baseline methods are included with experimental results, demonstrating that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art time-series clustering techniques. We further validate our method on real-world financial data, highlighting its practical applications in finance. By uncovering community structures in stock markets, our method provides deeper insights into stock relationships, benefiting market prediction, portfolio optimization, and risk management.