pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Pre-trained Vision-Language Models Learn Discoverable Visual Concepts
Authors: Yuan Zang, Tian Yun, Hao Tan, Trung Bui, Chen Sun
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00

Do vision-language models (VLMs) pre-trained to caption an image of a "durian" learn visual concepts such as "brown" (color) and "spiky" (texture) at the same time? We aim to answer this question as visual concepts learned "for free" would enable wide applications such as neuro-symbolic reasoning or human-interpretable object classification. We assume that the visual concepts, if captured by pre-trained VLMs, can be extracted by their vision-language interface with text-based concept prompts. We observe that recent works prompting VLMs with concepts often differ in their strategies to define and evaluate the visual concepts, leading to conflicting conclusions. We propose a new concept definition strategy based on two observations: First, certain concept prompts include shortcuts that recognize correct concepts for wrong reasons; Second, multimodal information (e.g. visual discriminativeness, and textual knowledge) should be leveraged when selecting the concepts. Our proposed concept discovery and learning (CDL) framework is thus designed to identify a diverse list of generic visual concepts (e.g. "spiky" as opposed to "spiky durian"), which are ranked and selected based on visual and language mutual information. We carefully design quantitative and human evaluations of the discovered concepts on six diverse visual recognition datasets, which confirm that pre-trained VLMs do learn visual concepts that provide accurate and thorough descriptions for the recognized objects. All code and models are publicly released.
Learning to Cut via Hierarchical Sequence/Set Model for Efficient Mixed-Integer Programming
Authors: Jie Wang, Zhihai Wang, Xijun Li, Yufei Kuang, Zhihao Shi, Fangzhou Zhu, Mingxuan Yuan, Jia Zeng, Yongdong Zhang, Feng Wu
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00

Cutting planes (cuts) play an important role in solving mixed-integer linear programs (MILPs), which formulate many important real-world applications. Cut selection heavily depends on (P1) which cuts to prefer and (P2) how many cuts to select. Although modern MILP solvers tackle (P1)-(P2) by human-designed heuristics, machine learning carries the potential to learn more effective heuristics. However, many existing learning-based methods learn which cuts to prefer, neglecting the importance of learning how many cuts to select. Moreover, we observe that (P3) what order of selected cuts to prefer significantly impacts the efficiency of MILP solvers as well. To address these challenges, we propose a novel hierarchical sequence/set model (HEM) to learn cut selection policies. Specifically, HEM is a bi-level model: (1) a higher-level module that learns how many cuts to select, (2) and a lower-level module -- that formulates the cut selection as a sequence/set to sequence learning problem -- to learn policies selecting an ordered subset with the cardinality determined by the higher-level module. To the best of our knowledge, HEM is the first data-driven methodology that well tackles (P1)-(P3) simultaneously. Experiments demonstrate that HEM significantly improves the efficiency of solving MILPs on eleven challenging MILP benchmarks, including two Huawei's real problems.
Transformer-Based Classification Outcome Prediction for Multimodal Stroke Treatment
Authors: Danqing Ma, Meng Wang, Ao Xiang, Zongqing Qi, Qin Yang
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, image-classification, Image Classification, Prediction, text-classification, Text Classification

This study proposes a multi-modal fusion framework Multitrans based on the Transformer architecture and self-attention mechanism. This architecture combines the study of non-contrast computed tomography (NCCT) images and discharge diagnosis reports of patients undergoing stroke treatment, using a variety of methods based on Transformer architecture approach to predicting functional outcomes of stroke treatment. The results show that the performance of single-modal text classification is significantly better than single-modal image classification, but the effect of multi-modal combination is better than any single modality. Although the Transformer model only performs worse on imaging data, when combined with clinical meta-diagnostic information, both can learn better complementary information and make good contributions to accurately predicting stroke treatment effects..
Breaching the Bottleneck: Evolutionary Transition from Reward-Driven Learning to Reward-Agnostic Domain-Adapted Learning in Neuromodulated Neural Nets
Authors: Solvi Arnold, Reiji Suzuki, Takaya Arita, Kimitoshi Yamazaki
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00

Advanced biological intelligence learns efficiently from an information-rich stream of stimulus information, even when feedback on behaviour quality is sparse or absent. Such learning exploits implicit assumptions about task domains. We refer to such learning as Domain-Adapted Learning (DAL). In contrast, AI learning algorithms rely on explicit externally provided measures of behaviour quality to acquire fit behaviour. This imposes an information bottleneck that precludes learning from diverse non-reward stimulus information, limiting learning efficiency. We consider the question of how biological evolution circumvents this bottleneck to produce DAL. We propose that species first evolve the ability to learn from reward signals, providing inefficient (bottlenecked) but broad adaptivity. From there, integration of non-reward information into the learning process can proceed via gradual accumulation of biases induced by such information on specific task domains. This scenario provides a biologically plausible pathway towards bottleneck-free, domain-adapted learning. Focusing on the second phase of this scenario, we set up a population of NNs with reward-driven learning modelled as Reinforcement Learning (A2C), and allow evolution to improve learning efficiency by integrating non-reward information into the learning process using a neuromodulatory update mechanism. On a navigation task in continuous 2D space, evolved DAL agents show a 300-fold increase in learning speed compared to pure RL agents. Evolution is found to eliminate reliance on reward information altogether, allowing DAL agents to learn from non-reward information exclusively, using local neuromodulation-based connection weight updates only. Code available at github.com/aislab/dal.
A Soft e-Textile Sensor for Enhanced Deep Learning-based Shape Sensing of Soft Continuum Robots
Authors: Eric Vincent Galeta, Ayman A. Nada, Sabah M. Ahmed, Victor Parque, Haitham El-Hussieny
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00

The safety and accuracy of robotic navigation hold paramount importance, especially in the realm of soft continuum robotics, where the limitations of traditional rigid sensors become evident. Encoders, piezoresistive, and potentiometer sensors often fail to integrate well with the flexible nature of these robots, adding unwanted bulk and rigidity. To overcome these hurdles, our study presents a new approach to shape sensing in soft continuum robots through the use of soft e-textile resistive sensors. This sensor, designed to flawlessly integrate with the robot's structure, utilizes a resistive material that adjusts its resistance in response to the robot's movements and deformations. This adjustment facilitates the capture of multidimensional force measurements across the soft sensor layers. A deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) is employed to decode the sensor signals, enabling precise estimation of the robot's shape configuration based on the detailed data from the e-textile sensor. Our research investigates the efficacy of this e-textile sensor in determining the curvature parameters of soft continuum robots. The findings are encouraging, showing that the soft e-textile sensor not only matches but potentially exceeds the capabilities of traditional rigid sensors in terms of shape sensing and estimation. This advancement significantly boosts the safety and efficiency of robotic navigation systems.
Grasper: A Generalist Pursuer for Pursuit-Evasion Problems
Authors: Pengdeng Li, Shuxin Li, Xinrun Wang, Jakub Cerny, Youzhi Zhang, Stephen Mcaleer, Hau Chan, Bo An
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning, Graph Neural Network

Pursuit-evasion games (PEGs) model interactions between a team of pursuers and an evader in graph-based environments such as urban street networks. Recent advancements have demonstrated the effectiveness of the pre-training and fine-tuning paradigm in PSRO to improve scalability in solving large-scale PEGs. However, these methods primarily focus on specific PEGs with fixed initial conditions that may vary substantially in real-world scenarios, which significantly hinders the applicability of the traditional methods. To address this issue, we introduce Grasper, a GeneRAlist purSuer for Pursuit-Evasion pRoblems, capable of efficiently generating pursuer policies tailored to specific PEGs. Our contributions are threefold: First, we present a novel architecture that offers high-quality solutions for diverse PEGs, comprising critical components such as (i) a graph neural network (GNN) to encode PEGs into hidden vectors, and (ii) a hypernetwork to generate pursuer policies based on these hidden vectors. As a second contribution, we develop an efficient three-stage training method involving (i) a pre-pretraining stage for learning robust PEG representations through self-supervised graph learning techniques like GraphMAE, (ii) a pre-training stage utilizing heuristic-guided multi-task pre-training (HMP) where heuristic-derived reference policies (e.g., through Dijkstra's algorithm) regularize pursuer policies, and (iii) a fine-tuning stage that employs PSRO to generate pursuer policies on designated PEGs. Finally, we perform extensive experiments on synthetic and real-world maps, showcasing Grasper's significant superiority over baselines in terms of solution quality and generalizability. We demonstrate that Grasper provides a versatile approach for solving pursuit-evasion problems across a broad range of scenarios, enabling practical deployment in real-world situations.
CORI: CJKV Benchmark with Romanization Integration -- A step towards Cross-lingual Transfer Beyond Textual Scripts
Authors: Hoang H. Nguyen, Chenwei Zhang, Ye Liu, Natalie Parde, Eugene Rohrbaugh, Philip S. Yu
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Cross-Lingual Transfer, Zero-Shot Cross-Lingual Transfer

Naively assuming English as a source language may hinder cross-lingual transfer for many languages by failing to consider the importance of language contact. Some languages are more well-connected than others, and target languages can benefit from transferring from closely related languages; for many languages, the set of closely related languages does not include English. In this work, we study the impact of source language for cross-lingual transfer, demonstrating the importance of selecting source languages that have high contact with the target language. We also construct a novel benchmark dataset for close contact Chinese-Japanese-Korean-Vietnamese (CJKV) languages to further encourage in-depth studies of language contact. To comprehensively capture contact between these languages, we propose to integrate Romanized transcription beyond textual scripts via Contrastive Learning objectives, leading to enhanced cross-lingual representations and effective zero-shot cross-lingual transfer.
GluMarker: A Novel Predictive Modeling of Glycemic Control Through Digital Biomarkers
Authors: Ziyi Zhou, Ming Cheng, Xingjian Diao, Yanjun Cui, Xiangling Li
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The escalating prevalence of diabetes globally underscores the need for diabetes management. Recent research highlights the growing focus on digital biomarkers in diabetes management, with innovations in computational frameworks and noninvasive monitoring techniques using personalized glucose metrics. However, they predominantly focus on insulin dosing and specific glucose values, or with limited attention given to overall glycemic control. This leaves a gap in expanding the scope of digital biomarkers for overall glycemic control in diabetes management. To address such a research gap, we propose GluMarker -- an end-to-end framework for modeling digital biomarkers using broader factors sources to predict glycemic control. Through the assessment and refinement of various machine learning baselines, GluMarker achieves state-of-the-art on Anderson's dataset in predicting next-day glycemic control. Moreover, our research identifies key digital biomarkers for the next day's glycemic control prediction. These identified biomarkers are instrumental in illuminating the daily factors that influence glycemic management, offering vital insights for diabetes care.
Parameter Efficient Diverse Paraphrase Generation Using Sequence-Level Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Lasal Jayawardena, Prasan Yapa
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Knowledge Distillation, Paraphrase Generation, Text Generation

Over the past year, the field of Natural Language Generation (NLG) has experienced an exponential surge, largely due to the introduction of Large Language Models (LLMs). These models have exhibited the most effective performance in a range of domains within the Natural Language Processing and Generation domains. However, their application in domain-specific tasks, such as paraphrasing, presents significant challenges. The extensive number of parameters makes them difficult to operate on commercial hardware, and they require substantial time for inference, leading to high costs in a production setting. In this study, we tackle these obstacles by employing LLMs to develop three distinct models for the paraphrasing field, applying a method referred to as sequence-level knowledge distillation. These distilled models are capable of maintaining the quality of paraphrases generated by the LLM. They demonstrate faster inference times and the ability to generate diverse paraphrases of comparable quality. A notable characteristic of these models is their ability to exhibit syntactic diversity while also preserving lexical diversity, features previously uncommon due to existing data quality issues in datasets and not typically observed in neural-based approaches. Human evaluation of our models shows that there is only a 4% drop in performance compared to the LLM teacher model used in the distillation process, despite being 1000 times smaller. This research provides a significant contribution to the NLG field, offering a more efficient and cost-effective solution for paraphrasing tasks.
Random Network Distillation Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for AGV Path Planning
Authors: Huilin Yin, Shengkai Su, Yinjia Lin, Pengju Zhen, Karin Festl, Daniel Watzenig
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning

With the flourishing development of intelligent warehousing systems, the technology of Automated Guided Vehicle (AGV) has experienced rapid growth. Within intelligent warehousing environments, AGV is required to safely and rapidly plan an optimal path in complex and dynamic environments. Most research has studied deep reinforcement learning to address this challenge. However, in the environments with sparse extrinsic rewards, these algorithms often converge slowly, learn inefficiently or fail to reach the target. Random Network Distillation (RND), as an exploration enhancement, can effectively improve the performance of proximal policy optimization, especially enhancing the additional intrinsic rewards of the AGV agent which is in sparse reward environments. Moreover, most of the current research continues to use 2D grid mazes as experimental environments. These environments have insufficient complexity and limited action sets. To solve this limitation, we present simulation environments of AGV path planning with continuous actions and positions for AGVs, so that it can be close to realistic physical scenarios. Based on our experiments and comprehensive analysis of the proposed method, the results demonstrate that our proposed method enables AGV to more rapidly complete path planning tasks with continuous actions in our environments. A video of part of our experiments can be found at https://youtu.be/lwrY9YesGmw.
Reinforcement Learning Approach for Integrating Compressed Contexts into Knowledge Graphs
Authors: Ngoc Quach, Qi Wang, Zijun Gao, Qifeng Sun, Bo Guan, Lillian Floyd
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

The widespread use of knowledge graphs in various fields has brought about a challenge in effectively integrating and updating information within them. When it comes to incorporating contexts, conventional methods often rely on rules or basic machine learning models, which may not fully grasp the complexity and fluidity of context information. This research suggests an approach based on reinforcement learning (RL), specifically utilizing Deep Q Networks (DQN) to enhance the process of integrating contexts into knowledge graphs. By considering the state of the knowledge graph as environment states defining actions as operations for integrating contexts and using a reward function to gauge the improvement in knowledge graph quality post-integration, this method aims to automatically develop strategies for optimal context integration. Our DQN model utilizes networks as function approximators, continually updating Q values to estimate the action value function, thus enabling effective integration of intricate and dynamic context information. Initial experimental findings show that our RL method outperforms techniques in achieving precise context integration across various standard knowledge graph datasets, highlighting the potential and effectiveness of reinforcement learning in enhancing and managing knowledge graphs.
iTBLS: A Dataset of Interactive Conversations Over Tabular Information
Authors: Anirudh Sundar, Christopher Richardson, William Gay, Larry Heck
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, Mathematical Reasoning, parameter-efficient fine-tuning

This paper introduces Interactive Tables (iTBLS), a dataset of interactive conversations situated in tables from scientific articles. This dataset is designed to facilitate human-AI collaborative problem-solving through AI-powered multi-task tabular capabilities. In contrast to prior work that models interactions as factoid QA or procedure synthesis, iTBLS broadens the scope of interactions to include mathematical reasoning, natural language manipulation, and expansion of existing tables from natural language conversation by delineating interactions into one of three tasks: interpretation, modification, or generation. Additionally, the paper presents a suite of baseline approaches to iTBLS, utilizing zero-shot prompting and parameter-efficient fine-tuning for different computing situations. We also introduce a novel multi-step approach and show how it can be leveraged in conjunction with parameter-efficient fine-tuning to achieve the state-of-the-art on iTBLS; outperforming standard parameter-efficient fine-tuning by up to 15% on interpretation, 18% on modification, and 38% on generation.
Multi-View Subgraph Neural Networks: Self-Supervised Learning with Scarce Labeled Data
Authors: Zhenzhong Wang, Qingyuan Zeng, WanYu Lin, Min Jiang, Kay Chen Tan
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification, Self-Supervised Learning

While graph neural networks (GNNs) have become the de-facto standard for graph-based node classification, they impose a strong assumption on the availability of sufficient labeled samples. This assumption restricts the classification performance of prevailing GNNs on many real-world applications suffering from low-data regimes. Specifically, features extracted from scarce labeled nodes could not provide sufficient supervision for the unlabeled samples, leading to severe over-fitting. In this work, we point out that leveraging subgraphs to capture long-range dependencies can augment the representation of a node with homophily properties, thus alleviating the low-data regime. However, prior works leveraging subgraphs fail to capture the long-range dependencies among nodes. To this end, we present a novel self-supervised learning framework, called multi-view subgraph neural networks (Muse), for handling long-range dependencies. In particular, we propose an information theory-based identification mechanism to identify two types of subgraphs from the views of input space and latent space, respectively. The former is to capture the local structure of the graph, while the latter captures the long-range dependencies among nodes. By fusing these two views of subgraphs, the learned representations can preserve the topological properties of the graph at large, including the local structure and long-range dependencies, thus maximizing their expressiveness for downstream node classification tasks. Experimental results show that Muse outperforms the alternative methods on node classification tasks with limited labeled data.
RetailOpt: Opt-In, Easy-to-Deploy Trajectory Estimation from Smartphone Motion Data and Retail Facility Information
Authors: Ryo Yonetani, Jun Baba, Yasutaka Furukawa
Date: 2024-04-19 00:00:00

We present RetailOpt, a novel opt-in, easy-to-deploy system for tracking customer movements offline in indoor retail environments. The system uses readily accessible information from customer smartphones and retail apps, including motion data, store maps, and purchase records. This eliminates the need for additional hardware installations/maintenance and ensures customers full data control. Specifically, RetailOpt first uses inertial navigation to recover relative trajectories from smartphone motion data. The store map and purchase records are cross-referenced to identify a list of visited shelves, providing anchors to localize the relative trajectories in a store through continuous and discrete optimization. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our system in five diverse environments. The system, if successful, would produce accurate customer movement data, essential for a broad range of retail applications including customer behavior analysis and in-store navigation.