pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
The Impact of Speech Anonymization on Pathology and Its Limits
Authors: Soroosh Tayebi Arasteh, Tomas Arias-Vergara, Paula Andrea Perez-Toro, Tobias Weise, Kai Packhaeuser, Maria Schuster, Elmar Noeth, Andreas Maier, Seung Hee Yang
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Fairness, Speaker anonymization

Integration of speech into healthcare has intensified privacy concerns due to its potential as a non-invasive biomarker containing individual biometric information. In response, speaker anonymization aims to conceal personally identifiable information while retaining crucial linguistic content. However, the application of anonymization techniques to pathological speech, a critical area where privacy is especially vital, has not been extensively examined. This study investigates anonymization's impact on pathological speech across over 2,700 speakers from multiple German institutions, focusing on privacy, pathological utility, and demographic fairness. We explore both deep-learning-based and signal processing-based anonymization methods. We document substantial privacy improvements across disorders-evidenced by equal error rate increases up to 1933%, with minimal overall impact on utility. Specific disorders such as Dysarthria, Dysphonia, and Cleft Lip and Palate experience minimal utility changes, while Dysglossia shows slight improvements. Our findings underscore that the impact of anonymization varies substantially across different disorders. This necessitates disorder-specific anonymization strategies to optimally balance privacy with diagnostic utility. Additionally, our fairness analysis reveals consistent anonymization effects across most of the demographics. This study demonstrates the effectiveness of anonymization in pathological speech for enhancing privacy, while also highlighting the importance of customized and disorder-specific approaches to account for inversion attacks.
Physics-Enhanced Graph Neural Networks For Soft Sensing in Industrial Internet of Things
Authors: Keivan Faghih Niresi, Hugo Bissig, Henri Baumann, Olga Fink
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: State Estimation

The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is reshaping manufacturing, industrial processes, and infrastructure management. By fostering new levels of automation, efficiency, and predictive maintenance, IIoT is transforming traditional industries into intelligent, seamlessly interconnected ecosystems. However, achieving highly reliable IIoT can be hindered by factors such as the cost of installing large numbers of sensors, limitations in retrofitting existing systems with sensors, or harsh environmental conditions that may make sensor installation impractical. Soft (virtual) sensing leverages mathematical models to estimate variables from physical sensor data, offering a solution to these challenges. Data-driven and physics-based modeling are the two main methodologies widely used for soft sensing. The choice between these strategies depends on the complexity of the underlying system, with the data-driven approach often being preferred when the physics-based inference models are intricate and present challenges for state estimation. However, conventional deep learning models are typically hindered by their inability to explicitly represent the complex interactions among various sensors. To address this limitation, we adopt Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), renowned for their ability to effectively capture the complex relationships between sensor measurements. In this research, we propose physics-enhanced GNNs, which integrate principles of physics into graph-based methodologies. This is achieved by augmenting additional nodes in the input graph derived from the underlying characteristics of the physical processes. Our evaluation of the proposed methodology on the case study of district heating networks reveals significant improvements over purely data-driven GNNs, even in the presence of noise and parameter inaccuracies.
Latent Guard: a Safety Framework for Text-to-image Generation
Authors: Runtao Liu, Ashkan Khakzar, Jindong Gu, Qifeng Chen, Philip Torr, Fabio Pizzati
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Image Generation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

With the ability to generate high-quality images, text-to-image (T2I) models can be exploited for creating inappropriate content. To prevent misuse, existing safety measures are either based on text blacklists, which can be easily circumvented, or harmful content classification, requiring large datasets for training and offering low flexibility. Hence, we propose Latent Guard, a framework designed to improve safety measures in text-to-image generation. Inspired by blacklist-based approaches, Latent Guard learns a latent space on top of the T2I model's text encoder, where it is possible to check the presence of harmful concepts in the input text embeddings. Our proposed framework is composed of a data generation pipeline specific to the task using large language models, ad-hoc architectural components, and a contrastive learning strategy to benefit from the generated data. The effectiveness of our method is verified on three datasets and against four baselines. Code and data will be shared at https://latentguard.github.io/.
Rethinking Artistic Copyright Infringements in the Era of Text-to-Image Generative Models
Authors: Mazda Moayeri, Samyadeep Basu, Sriram Balasubramanian, Priyatham Kattakinda, Atoosa Chengini, Robert Brauneis, Soheil Feizi
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Artistic style classification

Recent text-to-image generative models such as Stable Diffusion are extremely adept at mimicking and generating copyrighted content, raising concerns amongst artists that their unique styles may be improperly copied. Understanding how generative models copy "artistic style" is more complex than duplicating a single image, as style is comprised by a set of elements (or signature) that frequently co-occurs across a body of work, where each individual work may vary significantly. In our paper, we first reformulate the problem of "artistic copyright infringement" to a classification problem over image sets, instead of probing image-wise similarities. We then introduce ArtSavant, a practical (i.e., efficient and easy to understand) tool to (i) determine the unique style of an artist by comparing it to a reference dataset of works from 372 artists curated from WikiArt, and (ii) recognize if the identified style reappears in generated images. We leverage two complementary methods to perform artistic style classification over image sets, includingTagMatch, which is a novel inherently interpretable and attributable method, making it more suitable for broader use by non-technical stake holders (artists, lawyers, judges, etc). Leveraging ArtSavant, we then perform a large-scale empirical study to provide quantitative insight on the prevalence of artistic style copying across 3 popular text-to-image generative models. Namely, amongst a dataset of prolific artists (including many famous ones), only 20% of them appear to have their styles be at a risk of copying via simple prompting of today's popular text-to-image generative models.
A Multi-Expert Large Language Model Architecture for Verilog Code Generation
Authors: Bardia Nadimi, Hao Zheng
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Recently, there has been a surging interest in using large language models (LLMs) for Verilog code generation. However, the existing approaches are limited in terms of the quality of the generated Verilog code. To address such limitations, this paper introduces an innovative multi-expert LLM architecture for Verilog code generation (MEV-LLM). Our architecture uniquely integrates multiple LLMs, each specifically fine-tuned with a dataset that is categorized with respect to a distinct level of design complexity. It allows more targeted learning, directly addressing the nuances of generating Verilog code for each category. Empirical evidence from experiments highlights notable improvements in terms of the percentage of generated Verilog outputs that are syntactically and functionally correct. These findings underscore the efficacy of our approach, promising a forward leap in the field of automated hardware design through machine learning.
SurvMamba: State Space Model with Multi-grained Multi-modal Interaction for Survival Prediction
Authors: Ying Chen, Jiajing Xie, Yuxiang Lin, Yuhang Song, Wenxian Yang, Rongshan Yu
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Mamba, Prediction, Survival Prediction, whole slide images

Multi-modal learning that combines pathological images with genomic data has significantly enhanced the accuracy of survival prediction. Nevertheless, existing methods have not fully utilized the inherent hierarchical structure within both whole slide images (WSIs) and transcriptomic data, from which better intra-modal representations and inter-modal integration could be derived. Moreover, many existing studies attempt to improve multi-modal representations through attention mechanisms, which inevitably lead to high complexity when processing high-dimensional WSIs and transcriptomic data. Recently, a structured state space model named Mamba emerged as a promising approach for its superior performance in modeling long sequences with low complexity. In this study, we propose Mamba with multi-grained multi-modal interaction (SurvMamba) for survival prediction. SurvMamba is implemented with a Hierarchical Interaction Mamba (HIM) module that facilitates efficient intra-modal interactions at different granularities, thereby capturing more detailed local features as well as rich global representations. In addition, an Interaction Fusion Mamba (IFM) module is used for cascaded inter-modal interactive fusion, yielding more comprehensive features for survival prediction. Comprehensive evaluations on five TCGA datasets demonstrate that SurvMamba outperforms other existing methods in terms of performance and computational cost.
VeTraSS: Vehicle Trajectory Similarity Search Through Graph Modeling and Representation Learning
Authors: Ming Cheng, BoWen Zhang, Ziyu Wang, Ziyi Zhou, Weiqi Feng, Yi Lyu, Xingjian Diao
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Navigate, Representation Learning

Trajectory similarity search plays an essential role in autonomous driving, as it enables vehicles to analyze the information and characteristics of different trajectories to make informed decisions and navigate safely in dynamic environments. Existing work on the trajectory similarity search task primarily utilizes sequence-processing algorithms or Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), which suffer from the inevitable issues of complicated architecture and heavy training costs. Considering the intricate connections between trajectories, using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) for data modeling is feasible. However, most methods directly use existing mathematical graph structures as the input instead of constructing specific graphs from certain vehicle trajectory data. This ignores such data's unique and dynamic characteristics. To bridge such a research gap, we propose VeTraSS -- an end-to-end pipeline for Vehicle Trajectory Similarity Search. Specifically, VeTraSS models the original trajectory data into multi-scale graphs, and generates comprehensive embeddings through a novel multi-layer attention-based GNN. The learned embeddings can be used for searching similar vehicle trajectories. Extensive experiments on the Porto and Geolife datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of VeTraSS, where our model outperforms existing work and reaches the state-of-the-art. This demonstrates the potential of VeTraSS for trajectory analysis and safe navigation in self-driving vehicles in the real world.
Augmenting Knowledge Graph Hierarchies Using Neural Transformers
Authors: Sanat Sharma, Mayank Poddar, Jayant Kumar, Kosta Blank, Tracy King
Date: 2024-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs

Knowledge graphs are useful tools to organize, recommend and sort data. Hierarchies in knowledge graphs provide significant benefit in improving understanding and compartmentalization of the data within a knowledge graph. This work leverages large language models to generate and augment hierarchies in an existing knowledge graph. For small (<100,000 node) domain-specific KGs, we find that a combination of few-shot prompting with one-shot generation works well, while larger KG may require cyclical generation. We present techniques for augmenting hierarchies, which led to coverage increase by 98% for intents and 99% for colors in our knowledge graph.
Analyzing the Performance of Large Language Models on Code Summarization
Authors: Rajarshi Haldar, Julia Hockenmaier
Date: 2024-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Code Summarization

Large language models (LLMs) such as Llama 2 perform very well on tasks that involve both natural language and source code, particularly code summarization and code generation. We show that for the task of code summarization, the performance of these models on individual examples often depends on the amount of (subword) token overlap between the code and the corresponding reference natural language descriptions in the dataset. This token overlap arises because the reference descriptions in standard datasets (corresponding to docstrings in large code bases) are often highly similar to the names of the functions they describe. We also show that this token overlap occurs largely in the function names of the code and compare the relative performance of these models after removing function names versus removing code structure. We also show that using multiple evaluation metrics like BLEU and BERTScore gives us very little additional insight since these metrics are highly correlated with each other.
AI-Guided Feature Segmentation Techniques to Model Features from Single Crystal Diamond Growth
Authors: Rohan Reddy Mekala, Elias Garratt, Matthias Muehle, Arjun Srinivasan, Adam Porter, Mikael Lindvall
Date: 2024-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, Semantic Segmentation

Process refinement to consistently produce high-quality material over a large area of the grown crystal, enabling various applications from optics crystals to quantum detectors, has long been a goal for diamond growth. Machine learning offers a promising path toward this goal, but faces challenges such as the complexity of features within datasets, their time-dependency, and the volume of data produced per growth run. Accurate spatial feature extraction from image to image for real-time monitoring of diamond growth is crucial yet complicated due to the low-volume and high feature complexity nature of the datasets. This paper compares various traditional and machine learning-driven approaches for feature extraction in the diamond growth domain, proposing a novel deep learning-driven semantic segmentation approach to isolate and classify accurate pixel masks of geometric features like diamond, pocket holder, and background, along with their derivative features based on shape and size. Using an annotation-focused human-in-the-loop software architecture for training datasets, with modules for selective data labeling using active learning, data augmentations, and model-assisted labeling, our approach achieves effective annotation accuracy and drastically reduces labeling time and cost. Deep learning algorithms prove highly efficient in accurately learning complex representations from datasets with many features. Our top-performing model, based on the DeeplabV3plus architecture, achieves outstanding accuracy in classifying features of interest, with accuracies of 96.31% for pocket holder, 98.60% for diamond top, and 91.64% for diamond side features.
Enhanced Cooperative Perception for Autonomous Vehicles Using Imperfect Communication
Authors: Ahmad Sarlak, Hazim Alzorgan, Sayed Pedram Haeri Boroujeni, Abolfazl Razi, Rahul Amin
Date: 2024-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, object-detection, Object Detection, Pedestrian Detection

Sharing and joint processing of camera feeds and sensor measurements, known as Cooperative Perception (CP), has emerged as a new technique to achieve higher perception qualities. CP can enhance the safety of Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) where their individual visual perception quality is compromised by adverse weather conditions (haze as foggy weather), low illumination, winding roads, and crowded traffic. To cover the limitations of former methods, in this paper, we propose a novel approach to realize an optimized CP under constrained communications. At the core of our approach is recruiting the best helper from the available list of front vehicles to augment the visual range and enhance the Object Detection (OD) accuracy of the ego vehicle. In this two-step process, we first select the helper vehicles that contribute the most to CP based on their visual range and lowest motion blur. Next, we implement a radio block optimization among the candidate vehicles to further improve communication efficiency. We specifically focus on pedestrian detection as an exemplary scenario. To validate our approach, we used the CARLA simulator to create a dataset of annotated videos for different driving scenarios where pedestrian detection is challenging for an AV with compromised vision. Our results demonstrate the efficacy of our two-step optimization process in improving the overall performance of cooperative perception in challenging scenarios, substantially improving driving safety under adverse conditions. Finally, we note that the networking assumptions are adopted from LTE Release 14 Mode 4 side-link communication, commonly used for Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) communication. Nonetheless, our method is flexible and applicable to arbitrary V2V communications.
EventEgo3D: 3D Human Motion Capture from Egocentric Event Streams
Authors: Christen Millerdurai, Hiroyasu Akada, Jian Wang, Diogo Luvizon, Christian Theobalt, Vladislav Golyanik
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: 3D Human Pose Estimation, 3D Pose Estimation, 3D Reconstruction, Egocentric Pose Estimation, Pose Estimation

Monocular egocentric 3D human motion capture is a challenging and actively researched problem. Existing methods use synchronously operating visual sensors (e.g. RGB cameras) and often fail under low lighting and fast motions, which can be restricting in many applications involving head-mounted devices. In response to the existing limitations, this paper 1) introduces a new problem, i.e., 3D human motion capture from an egocentric monocular event camera with a fisheye lens, and 2) proposes the first approach to it called EventEgo3D (EE3D). Event streams have high temporal resolution and provide reliable cues for 3D human motion capture under high-speed human motions and rapidly changing illumination. The proposed EE3D framework is specifically tailored for learning with event streams in the LNES representation, enabling high 3D reconstruction accuracy. We also design a prototype of a mobile head-mounted device with an event camera and record a real dataset with event observations and the ground-truth 3D human poses (in addition to the synthetic dataset). Our EE3D demonstrates robustness and superior 3D accuracy compared to existing solutions across various challenging experiments while supporting real-time 3D pose update rates of 140Hz.
COCONut: Modernizing COCO Segmentation
Authors: Xueqing Deng, Qihang Yu, Peng Wang, Xiaohui Shen, Liang-Chieh Chen
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Panoptic Segmentation, Segmentation, Universal Segmentation

In recent decades, the vision community has witnessed remarkable progress in visual recognition, partially owing to advancements in dataset benchmarks. Notably, the established COCO benchmark has propelled the development of modern detection and segmentation systems. However, the COCO segmentation benchmark has seen comparatively slow improvement over the last decade. Originally equipped with coarse polygon annotations for thing instances, it gradually incorporated coarse superpixel annotations for stuff regions, which were subsequently heuristically amalgamated to yield panoptic segmentation annotations. These annotations, executed by different groups of raters, have resulted not only in coarse segmentation masks but also in inconsistencies between segmentation types. In this study, we undertake a comprehensive reevaluation of the COCO segmentation annotations. By enhancing the annotation quality and expanding the dataset to encompass 383K images with more than 5.18M panoptic masks, we introduce COCONut, the COCO Next Universal segmenTation dataset. COCONut harmonizes segmentation annotations across semantic, instance, and panoptic segmentation with meticulously crafted high-quality masks, and establishes a robust benchmark for all segmentation tasks. To our knowledge, COCONut stands as the inaugural large-scale universal segmentation dataset, verified by human raters. We anticipate that the release of COCONut will significantly contribute to the community's ability to assess the progress of novel neural networks.
Probing the 3D Awareness of Visual Foundation Models
Authors: Mohamed El Banani, Amit Raj, Kevis-Kokitsi Maninis, Abhishek Kar, Yuanzhen Li, Michael Rubinstein, Deqing Sun, Leonidas Guibas, Justin Johnson, Varun Jampani
Date: 2024-04-12 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1

Recent advances in large-scale pretraining have yielded visual foundation models with strong capabilities. Not only can recent models generalize to arbitrary images for their training task, their intermediate representations are useful for other visual tasks such as detection and segmentation. Given that such models can classify, delineate, and localize objects in 2D, we ask whether they also represent their 3D structure? In this work, we analyze the 3D awareness of visual foundation models. We posit that 3D awareness implies that representations (1) encode the 3D structure of the scene and (2) consistently represent the surface across views. We conduct a series of experiments using task-specific probes and zero-shot inference procedures on frozen features. Our experiments reveal several limitations of the current models. Our code and analysis can be found at https://github.com/mbanani/probe3d.