pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
NaviSplit: Dynamic Multi-Branch Split DNNs for Efficient Distributed Autonomous Navigation
Authors: Timothy K Johnsen, Ian Harshbarger, Zixia Xia, Marco Levorato
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Navigation

Lightweight autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are emerging as a central component of a broad range of applications. However, autonomous navigation necessitates the implementation of perception algorithms, often deep neural networks (DNN), that process the input of sensor observations, such as that from cameras and LiDARs, for control logic. The complexity of such algorithms clashes with the severe constraints of these devices in terms of computing power, energy, memory, and execution time. In this paper, we propose NaviSplit, the first instance of a lightweight navigation framework embedding a distributed and dynamic multi-branched neural model. At its core is a DNN split at a compression point, resulting in two model parts: (1) the head model, that is executed at the vehicle, which partially processes and compacts perception from sensors; and (2) the tail model, that is executed at an interconnected compute-capable device, which processes the remainder of the compacted perception and infers navigation commands. Different from prior work, the NaviSplit framework includes a neural gate that dynamically selects a specific head model to minimize channel usage while efficiently supporting the navigation network. In our implementation, the perception model extracts a 2D depth map from a monocular RGB image captured by the drone using the robust simulator Microsoft AirSim. Our results demonstrate that the NaviSplit depth model achieves an extraction accuracy of 72-81% while transmitting an extremely small amount of data (1.2-18 KB) to the edge server. When using the neural gate, as utilized by NaviSplit, we obtain a slightly higher navigation accuracy as compared to a larger static network by 0.3% while significantly reducing the data rate by 95%. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first exemplar of dynamic multi-branched model based on split DNNs for autonomous navigation.
Evaluating $n$-Gram Novelty of Language Models Using Rusty-DAWG
Authors: William Merrill, Noah A. Smith, Yanai Elazar
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00

How novel are texts generated by language models (LMs) relative to their training corpora? In this work, we investigate the extent to which modern LMs generate $n$-grams from their training data, evaluating both (i) the probability LMs assign to complete training $n$-grams and (ii) $n$-novelty, the proportion of $n$-grams generated by an LM that did not appear in the training data (for arbitrarily large $n$). To enable arbitrary-length $n$-gram search over a corpus in constant time w.r.t. corpus size, we develop Rusty-DAWG, a novel search tool inspired by indexing of genomic data. We compare the novelty of LM-generated text to human-written text and explore factors that affect generation novelty, focusing on the Pythia models. We find that, for $n > 4$, LM-generated text is less novel than human-written text, though it is more novel for smaller $n$. Larger LMs and more constrained decoding strategies both decrease novelty. Finally, we show that LMs complete $n$-grams with lower loss if they are more frequent in the training data. Overall, our results reveal factors influencing the novelty of LM-generated text, and we release Rusty-DAWG to facilitate further pretraining data research.
MaskPure: Improving Defense Against Text Adversaries with Stochastic Purification
Authors: Harrison Gietz, Jugal Kalita
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Defense, Denoising, Language Modelling

The improvement of language model robustness, including successful defense against adversarial attacks, remains an open problem. In computer vision settings, the stochastic noising and de-noising process provided by diffusion models has proven useful for purifying input images, thus improving model robustness against adversarial attacks. Similarly, some initial work has explored the use of random noising and de-noising to mitigate adversarial attacks in an NLP setting, but improving the quality and efficiency of these methods is necessary for them to remain competitive. We extend upon methods of input text purification that are inspired by diffusion processes, which randomly mask and refill portions of the input text before classification. Our novel method, MaskPure, exceeds or matches robustness compared to other contemporary defenses, while also requiring no adversarial classifier training and without assuming knowledge of the attack type. In addition, we show that MaskPure is provably certifiably robust. To our knowledge, MaskPure is the first stochastic-purification method with demonstrated success against both character-level and word-level attacks, indicating the generalizable and promising nature of stochastic denoising defenses. In summary: the MaskPure algorithm bridges literature on the current strongest certifiable and empirical adversarial defense methods, showing that both theoretical and practical robustness can be obtained together. Code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/hubarruby/MaskPure.
Machine Learning and Optimization Techniques for Solving Inverse Kinematics in a 7-DOF Robotic Arm
Authors: Enoch Adediran, Salem Ameen
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00

As the pace of AI technology continues to accelerate, more tools have become available to researchers to solve longstanding problems, Hybrid approaches available today continue to push the computational limits of efficiency and precision. One of such problems is the inverse kinematics of redundant systems. This paper explores the complexities of a 7 degree of freedom manipulator and explores 13 optimization techniques to solve it. Additionally, a novel approach is proposed to contribute to the field of algorithmic research. This was found to be over 200 times faster than the well-known traditional Particle Swarm Optimization technique. This new method may serve as a new field of search that combines the explorative capabilities of Machine Learning with the exploitative capabilities of numerical methods.
Scale-Translation Equivariant Network for Oceanic Internal Solitary Wave Localization
Authors: Zhang Wan, Shuo Wang, Xudong Zhang
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, Translation

Internal solitary waves (ISWs) are gravity waves that are often observed in the interior ocean rather than the surface. They hold significant importance due to their capacity to carry substantial energy, thus influence pollutant transport, oil platform operations, submarine navigation, etc. Researchers have studied ISWs through optical images, synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images, and altimeter data from remote sensing instruments. However, cloud cover in optical remote sensing images variably obscures ground information, leading to blurred or missing surface observations. As such, this paper aims at altimeter-based machine learning solutions to automatically locate ISWs. The challenges, however, lie in the following two aspects: 1) the altimeter data has low resolution, which requires a strong machine learner; 2) labeling data is extremely labor-intensive, leading to very limited data for training. In recent years, the grand progress of deep learning demonstrates strong learning capacity given abundant data. Besides, more recent studies on efficient learning and self-supervised learning laid solid foundations to tackle the aforementioned challenges. In this paper, we propose to inject prior knowledge to achieve a strong and efficient learner. Specifically, intrinsic patterns in altimetry data are efficiently captured using a scale-translation equivariant convolutional neural network (ST-ECNN). By considering inherent symmetries in neural network design, ST-ECNN achieves higher efficiency and better performance than baseline models. Furthermore, we also introduce prior knowledge from massive unsupervised data to enhance our solution using the SimCLR framework for pre-training. Our final solution achieves an overall better performance than baselines on our handcrafted altimetry dataset. Data and codes are available at https://github.com/ZhangWan-byte/Internal_Solitary_Wave_Localization .
Informed along the road: roadway capacity driven graph convolution network for network-wide traffic prediction
Authors: Zilin Bian, Jingqin Gao, Kaan Ozbay, Fan Zuo, Dachuan Zuo, Zhenning Li
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Traffic Prediction

While deep learning has shown success in predicting traffic states, most methods treat it as a general prediction task without considering transportation aspects. Recently, graph neural networks have proven effective for this task, but few incorporate external factors that impact roadway capacity and traffic flow. This study introduces the Roadway Capacity Driven Graph Convolution Network (RCDGCN) model, which incorporates static and dynamic roadway capacity attributes in spatio-temporal settings to predict network-wide traffic states. The model was evaluated on two real-world datasets with different transportation factors: the ICM-495 highway network and an urban network in Manhattan, New York City. Results show RCDGCN outperformed baseline methods in forecasting accuracy. Analyses, including ablation experiments, weight analysis, and case studies, investigated the effect of capacity-related factors. The study demonstrates the potential of using RCDGCN for transportation system management.
Assessing AI vs Human-Authored Spear Phishing SMS Attacks: An Empirical Study
Authors: Jerson Francia, Derek Hansen, Ben Schooley, Matthew Taylor, Shydra Murray, Greg Snow
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Persuasiveness

This paper explores the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) in spear phishing message generation and evaluates their performance compared to human-authored counterparts. Our pilot study examines the effectiveness of smishing (SMS phishing) messages created by GPT-4 and human authors, which have been personalized for willing targets. The targets assessed these messages in a modified ranked-order experiment using a novel methodology we call TRAPD (Threshold Ranking Approach for Personalized Deception). Experiments involved ranking each spear phishing message from most to least convincing, providing qualitative feedback, and guessing which messages were human- or AI-generated. Results show that LLM-generated messages are often perceived as more convincing than those authored by humans, particularly job-related messages. Targets also struggled to distinguish between human- and AI-generated messages. We analyze different criteria the targets used to assess the persuasiveness and source of messages. This study aims to highlight the urgent need for further research and improved countermeasures against personalized AI-enabled social engineering attacks.
Bayesian-LoRA: LoRA based Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning using Optimal Quantization levels and Rank Values trough Differentiable Bayesian Gates
Authors: Cristian Meo, Ksenia Sycheva, Anirudh Goyal, Justin Dauwels
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Quantization

It is a common practice in natural language processing to pre-train a single model on a general domain and then fine-tune it for downstream tasks. However, when it comes to Large Language Models, fine-tuning the entire model can be computationally expensive, resulting in very intensive energy consumption. As a result, several Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) approaches were recently proposed. One of the most popular approaches is low-rank adaptation (LoRA), where the key insight is decomposing the update weights of the pre-trained model into two low-rank matrices. However, the proposed approaches either use the same rank value across all different weight matrices, which has been shown to be a sub-optimal choice, or do not use any quantization technique, one of the most important factors when it comes to a model's energy consumption. In this work, we propose Bayesian-LoRA which approaches low-rank adaptation and quantization from a Bayesian perspective by employing a prior distribution on both quantization levels and rank values. As a result, B-LoRA is able to fine-tune a pre-trained model on a specific downstream task, finding the optimal rank values and quantization levels for every low-rank matrix. We validate the proposed model by fine-tuning a pre-trained DeBERTaV3 on the GLUE benchmark. Moreover, we compare it to relevant baselines and present both qualitative and quantitative results, showing how the proposed approach is able to learn optimal-rank quantized matrices. B-LoRA performs on par with or better than the baselines while reducing the total number of bit operations by roughly 70% compared to the baseline methods.
Traffic Prediction considering Multiple Levels of Spatial-temporal Information: A Multi-scale Graph Wavelet-based Approach
Authors: Zilin Bian, Jingqin Gao, Kaan Ozbay, Zhenning Li
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Traffic Prediction

Although traffic prediction has been receiving considerable attention with a number of successes in the context of intelligent transportation systems, the prediction of traffic states over a complex transportation network that contains different road types has remained a challenge. This study proposes a multi-scale graph wavelet temporal convolution network (MSGWTCN) to predict the traffic states in complex transportation networks. Specifically, a multi-scale spatial block is designed to simultaneously capture the spatial information at different levels, and the gated temporal convolution network is employed to extract the temporal dependencies of the data. The model jointly learns to mount multiple levels of the spatial interactions by stacking graph wavelets with different scales. Two real-world datasets are used in this study to investigate the model performance, including a highway network in Seattle and a dense road network of Manhattan in New York City. Experiment results show that the proposed model outperforms other baseline models. Furthermore, different scales of graph wavelets are found to be effective in extracting local, intermediate and global information at the same time and thus enable the model to learn a complex transportation network topology with various types of road segments. By carefully customizing the scales of wavelets, the model is able to improve the prediction performance and better adapt to different network configurations.
Real-time Yemeni Currency Detection
Authors: Edrees AL-Edreesi, Ghaleb Al-Gaphari
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Banknote recognition is a major problem faced by visually Challenged people. So we propose a application to help the visually Challenged people to identify the different types of Yemenian currencies through deep learning technique. As money has a significant role in daily life for any business transactions, real-time detection and recognition of banknotes become necessary for a person, especially blind or visually impaired, or for a system that sorts the data. This paper presents a real-time Yemeni currency detection system for visually impaired persons. The proposed system exploits the deep learning approach to facilitate the visually impaired people to prosperously recognize banknotes. For real-time recognition, we have deployed the system into a mobile application.
Deriving Hematological Disease Classes Using Fuzzy Logic and Expert Knowledge: A Comprehensive Machine Learning Approach with CBC Parameters
Authors: Salem Ameen, Ravivarman Balachandran, Theodoros Theodoridis
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic

In the intricate field of medical diagnostics, capturing the subtle manifestations of diseases remains a challenge. Traditional methods, often binary in nature, may not encapsulate the nuanced variances that exist in real-world clinical scenarios. This paper introduces a novel approach by leveraging Fuzzy Logic Rules to derive disease classes based on expert domain knowledge from a medical practitioner. By recognizing that diseases do not always fit into neat categories, and that expert knowledge can guide the fuzzification of these boundaries, our methodology offers a more sophisticated and nuanced diagnostic tool. Using a dataset procured from a prominent hospital, containing detailed patient blood count records, we harness Fuzzy Logic Rules, a computational technique celebrated for its ability to handle ambiguity. This approach, moving through stages of fuzzification, rule application, inference, and ultimately defuzzification, produces refined diagnostic predictions. When combined with the Random Forest classifier, the system adeptly predicts hematological conditions using Complete Blood Count (CBC) parameters. Preliminary results showcase high accuracy levels, underscoring the advantages of integrating fuzzy logic into the diagnostic process. When juxtaposed with traditional diagnostic techniques, it becomes evident that Fuzzy Logic, especially when guided by medical expertise, offers significant advancements in the realm of hematological diagnostics. This paper not only paves the path for enhanced patient care but also beckons a deeper dive into the potentialities of fuzzy logic in various medical diagnostic applications.
Detecting Errors through Ensembling Prompts (DEEP): An End-to-End LLM Framework for Detecting Factual Errors
Authors: Alex Chandler, Devesh Surve, Hui Su
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Text Summarization

Accurate text summarization is one of the most common and important tasks performed by Large Language Models, where the costs of human review for an entire document may be high, but the costs of errors in summarization may be even greater. We propose Detecting Errors through Ensembling Prompts (DEEP) - an end-to-end large language model framework for detecting factual errors in text summarization. Our framework uses a diverse set of LLM prompts to identify factual inconsistencies, treating their outputs as binary features, which are then fed into ensembling models. We then calibrate the ensembled models to produce empirically accurate probabilities that a text is factually consistent or free of hallucination. We demonstrate that prior models for detecting factual errors in summaries perform significantly worse without optimizing the thresholds on subsets of the evaluated dataset. Our framework achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) balanced accuracy on the AggreFact-XSUM FTSOTA, TofuEval Summary-Level, and HaluEval Summarization benchmarks in detecting factual errors within transformer-generated text summaries. It does so without any fine-tuning of the language model or reliance on thresholding techniques not available in practical settings.
ClaudesLens: Uncertainty Quantification in Computer Vision Models
Authors: Mohamad Al Shaar, Nils Ekström, Gustav Gille, Reza Rezvan, Ivan Wely
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

In a world where more decisions are made using artificial intelligence, it is of utmost importance to ensure these decisions are well-grounded. Neural networks are the modern building blocks for artificial intelligence. Modern neural network-based computer vision models are often used for object classification tasks. Correctly classifying objects with \textit{certainty} has become of great importance in recent times. However, quantifying the inherent \textit{uncertainty} of the output from neural networks is a challenging task. Here we show a possible method to quantify and evaluate the uncertainty of the output of different computer vision models based on Shannon entropy. By adding perturbation of different levels, on different parts, ranging from the input to the parameters of the network, one introduces entropy to the system. By quantifying and evaluating the perturbed models on the proposed PI and PSI metrics, we can conclude that our theoretical framework can grant insight into the uncertainty of predictions of computer vision models. We believe that this theoretical framework can be applied to different applications for neural networks. We believe that Shannon entropy may eventually have a bigger role in the SOTA (State-of-the-art) methods to quantify uncertainty in artificial intelligence. One day we might be able to apply Shannon entropy to our neural systems.
Coding Speech through Vocal Tract Kinematics
Authors: Cheol Jun Cho, Peter Wu, Tejas S. Prabhune, Dhruv Agarwal, Gopala K. Anumanchipalli
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Voice Conversion

Vocal tract articulation is a natural, grounded control space of speech production. The spatiotemporal coordination of articulators combined with the vocal source shapes intelligible speech sounds to enable effective spoken communication. Based on this physiological grounding of speech, we propose a new framework of neural encoding-decoding of speech -- Speech Articulatory Coding (SPARC). SPARC comprises an articulatory analysis model that infers articulatory features from speech audio, and an articulatory synthesis model that synthesizes speech audio from articulatory features. The articulatory features are kinematic traces of vocal tract articulators and source features, which are intuitively interpretable and controllable, being the actual physical interface of speech production. An additional speaker identity encoder is jointly trained with the articulatory synthesizer to inform the voice texture of individual speakers. By training on large-scale speech data, we achieve a fully intelligible, high-quality articulatory synthesizer that generalizes to unseen speakers. Furthermore, the speaker embedding is effectively disentangled from articulations, which enables accent-perserving zero-shot voice conversion. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration of universal, high-performance articulatory inference and synthesis, suggesting the proposed framework as a powerful coding system of speech.
SHIELD: Evaluation and Defense Strategies for Copyright Compliance in LLM Text Generation
Authors: Xiaoze Liu, Ting Sun, Tianyang Xu, Feijie Wu, Cunxiang Wang, Xiaoqian Wang, Jing Gao
Date: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Text Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed machine learning but raised significant legal concerns due to their potential to produce text that infringes on copyrights, resulting in several high-profile lawsuits. The legal landscape is struggling to keep pace with these rapid advancements, with ongoing debates about whether generated text might plagiarize copyrighted materials. Current LLMs may infringe on copyrights or overly restrict non-copyrighted texts, leading to these challenges: (i) the need for a comprehensive evaluation benchmark to assess copyright compliance from multiple aspects; (ii) evaluating robustness against safeguard bypassing attacks; and (iii) developing effective defense targeted against the generation of copyrighted text. To tackle these challenges, we introduce a curated dataset to evaluate methods, test attack strategies, and propose lightweight, real-time defense to prevent the generation of copyrighted text, ensuring the safe and lawful use of LLMs. Our experiments demonstrate that current LLMs frequently output copyrighted text, and that jailbreaking attacks can significantly increase the volume of copyrighted output. Our proposed defense mechanism significantly reduces the volume of copyrighted text generated by LLMs by effectively refusing malicious requests. Code is publicly available at https://github.com/xz-liu/SHIELD