pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Karush-Kuhn-Tucker Condition-Trained Neural Networks (KKT Nets)
Authors: Shreya Arvind, Rishabh Pomaje, Rajshekhar V Bhat
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00

This paper presents a novel approach to solving convex optimization problems by leveraging the fact that, under certain regularity conditions, any set of primal or dual variables satisfying the Karush-Kuhn-Tucker (KKT) conditions is necessary and sufficient for optimality. Similar to Theory-Trained Neural Networks (TTNNs), the parameters of the convex optimization problem are input to the neural network, and the expected outputs are the optimal primal and dual variables. A choice for the loss function in this case is a loss, which we refer to as the KKT Loss, that measures how well the network's outputs satisfy the KKT conditions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach using a linear program as an example. For this problem, we observe that minimizing the KKT Loss alone outperforms training the network with a weighted sum of the KKT Loss and a Data Loss (the mean-squared error between the ground truth optimal solutions and the network's output). Moreover, minimizing only the Data Loss yields inferior results compared to those obtained by minimizing the KKT Loss. While the approach is promising, the obtained primal and dual solutions are not sufficiently close to the ground truth optimal solutions. In the future, we aim to develop improved models to obtain solutions closer to the ground truth and extend the approach to other problem classes.
Self-Explained Keywords Empower Large Language Models for Code Generation
Authors: Lishui Fan, Mouxiang Chen, Zhongxin Liu
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, HumanEval, mbpp

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance in code generation. However, due to the long-tail distribution of LLMs' training data, low-frequency terms are typically underrepresented in the training process. Consequently, LLMs often misunderstand or overlook problem-specific, low-frequency keywords during code generation, compromising the accuracy of the generated code. To address this, we propose a novel technique named SEK(\textbf{S}elf-\textbf{E}xplained \textbf{K}eywords), which empowers an LLM for better code generation by extracting and explaining the key terms in the problem description with the LLM itself and ranking them based on frequency. Comprehensive experiments across three benchmarks, i.e., HumanEval(+), MBPP(+), and APPS, with five representative LLMs, show that SEK can significantly improve LLMs in code generation, yielding substantial and consistent gains. For instance, SEK improves the Pass@1 of DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Instruct from 85.4\% to 93.3\% on the Humaneval benchmark. Further analysis confirms that SEK enables the LLMs to shift their attention from low-frequency keywords to their corresponding high-frequency counterparts.
Systematic Exploration of Dialogue Summarization Approaches for Reproducibility, Comparative Assessment, and Methodological Innovations for Advancing Natural Language Processing in Abstractive Summarization
Authors: Yugandhar Reddy Gogireddy, Jithendra Reddy Gogireddy
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Decision Making, Information Retrieval, Informativeness

Reproducibility in scientific research, particularly within the realm of natural language processing (NLP), is essential for validating and verifying the robustness of experimental findings. This paper delves into the reproduction and evaluation of dialogue summarization models, focusing specifically on the discrepancies observed between original studies and our reproduction efforts. Dialogue summarization is a critical aspect of NLP, aiming to condense conversational content into concise and informative summaries, thus aiding in efficient information retrieval and decision-making processes. Our research involved a thorough examination of several dialogue summarization models using the AMI (Augmented Multi-party Interaction) dataset. The models assessed include Hierarchical Memory Networks (HMNet) and various versions of Pointer-Generator Networks (PGN), namely PGN(DKE), PGN(DRD), PGN(DTS), and PGN(DALL). The primary objective was to evaluate the informativeness and quality of the summaries generated by these models through human assessment, a method that introduces subjectivity and variability in the evaluation process. The analysis began with Dataset 1, where the sample standard deviation of 0.656 indicated a moderate dispersion of data points around the mean.
AI-Driven Innovations in Modern Cloud Computing
Authors: Animesh Kumar
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing, Management

The world has witnessed rapid technological transformation, past couple of decades and with Advent of Cloud computing the landscape evolved exponentially leading to efficient and scalable application development. Now, the past couple of years the digital ecosystem has brought in numerous innovations with integration of Artificial Intelligence commonly known as AI. This paper explores how AI and cloud computing intersect to deliver transformative capabilities for modernizing applications by providing services and infrastructure. Harnessing the combined potential of both AI & Cloud technologies, technology providers can now exploit intelligent resource management, predictive analytics, automated deployment & scaling with enhanced security leading to offering innovative solutions to their customers. Furthermore, by leveraging such technologies of cloud & AI businesses can reap rich rewards in the form of reducing operational costs and improving service delivery. This paper further addresses challenges associated such as data privacy concerns and how it can be mitigated with robust AI governance frameworks.
Do Large Language Models Have an English Accent? Evaluating and Improving the Naturalness of Multilingual LLMs
Authors: Yanzhu Guo, Simone Conia, Zelin Zhou, Min Li, Saloni Potdar, Henry Xiao
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00

Current Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly designed with English as the primary language, and even the few that are multilingual tend to exhibit strong English-centric biases. Much like speakers who might produce awkward expressions when learning a second language, LLMs often generate unnatural outputs in non-English languages, reflecting English-centric patterns in both vocabulary and grammar. Despite the importance of this issue, the naturalness of multilingual LLM outputs has received limited attention. In this paper, we address this gap by introducing novel automatic corpus-level metrics to assess the lexical and syntactic naturalness of LLM outputs in a multilingual context. Using our new metrics, we evaluate state-of-the-art LLMs on a curated benchmark in French and Chinese, revealing a tendency towards English-influenced patterns. To mitigate this issue, we also propose a simple and effective alignment method to improve the naturalness of an LLM in a target language and domain, achieving consistent improvements in naturalness without compromising the performance on general-purpose benchmarks. Our work highlights the importance of developing multilingual metrics, resources and methods for the new wave of multilingual LLMs.
TS-ACL: Closed-Form Solution for Time Series-oriented Continual Learning
Authors: Jiaxu Li, Kejia Fan, Songning Lai, Linpu Lv, Jinfeng Xu, Jianheng Tang, Anfeng Liu, Houbing Herbert Song, Yutao Yue, Yunhuai Liu, Huiping Zhuang
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Continual Learning, Edge-computing, Exemplar-Free, Form, Incremental Learning, Privacy Preserving, Time Series, Time Series Classification

Time series classification underpins critical applications such as healthcare diagnostics and gesture-driven interactive systems in multimedia scenarios. However, time series class-incremental learning (TSCIL) faces two major challenges: catastrophic forgetting and intra-class variations. Catastrophic forgetting occurs because gradient-based parameter update strategies inevitably erase past knowledge. And unlike images, time series data exhibits subject-specific patterns, also known as intra-class variations, which refer to differences in patterns observed within the same class. While exemplar-based methods fail to cover diverse variation with limited samples, existing exemplar-free methods lack explicit mechanisms to handle intra-class variations. To address these two challenges, we propose TS-ACL, which leverages a gradient-free closed-form solution to avoid the catastrophic forgetting problem inherent in gradient-based optimization methods while simultaneously learning global distributions to resolve intra-class variations. Additionally, it provides privacy protection and efficiency. Extensive experiments on five benchmark datasets covering various sensor modalities and tasks demonstrate that TS-ACL achieves performance close to joint training on four datasets, outperforming existing methods and establishing a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) for TSCIL.
User-centric evaluation of explainability of AI with and for humans: a comprehensive empirical study
Authors: Szymon Bobek, Paloma Korycińska, Monika Krakowska, Maciej Mozolewski, Dorota Rak, Magdalena Zych, Magdalena Wójcik, Grzegorz J. Nalepa
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Visualization, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI)

This study is located in the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HCAI) and focuses on the results of a user-centered assessment of commonly used eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) algorithms, specifically investigating how humans understand and interact with the explanations provided by these algorithms. To achieve this, we employed a multi-disciplinary approach that included state-of-the-art research methods from social sciences to measure the comprehensibility of explanations generated by a state-of-the-art lachine learning model, specifically the Gradient Boosting Classifier (XGBClassifier). We conducted an extensive empirical user study involving interviews with 39 participants from three different groups, each with varying expertise in data science, data visualization, and domain-specific knowledge related to the dataset used for training the machine learning model. Participants were asked a series of questions to assess their understanding of the model's explanations. To ensure replicability, we built the model using a publicly available dataset from the UC Irvine Machine Learning Repository, focusing on edible and non-edible mushrooms. Our findings reveal limitations in existing XAI methods and confirm the need for new design principles and evaluation techniques that address the specific information needs and user perspectives of different classes of AI stakeholders. We believe that the results of our research and the cross-disciplinary methodology we developed can be successfully adapted to various data types and user profiles, thus promoting dialogue and address opportunities in HCAI research. To support this, we are making the data resulting from our study publicly available.
Redefining Finance: The Influence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML)
Authors: Animesh Kumar
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Fraud Detection, Management

With rapid transformation of technologies, the fusion of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) in finance is disrupting the entire ecosystem and operations which were followed for decades. The current landscape is where decisions are increasingly data-driven by financial institutions with an appetite for automation while mitigating risks. The segments of financial institutions which are getting heavily influenced are retail banking, wealth management, corporate banking & payment ecosystem. The solution ranges from onboarding the customers all the way fraud detection & prevention to enhancing the customer services. Financial Institutes are leap frogging with integration of Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning in mainstream applications and enhancing operational efficiency through advanced predictive analytics, extending personalized customer experiences, and automation to minimize risk with fraud detection techniques. However, with Adoption of AI & ML, it is imperative that the financial institute also needs to address ethical and regulatory challenges, by putting in place robust governance frameworks and responsible AI practices.
AI-Driven Approaches for Glaucoma Detection -- A Comprehensive Review
Authors: Yuki Hagiwara, Octavia-Andreea Ciora, Maureen Monnet, Gino Lancho, Jeanette Miriam Lorenz
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The diagnosis of glaucoma plays a critical role in the management and treatment of this vision-threatening disease. Glaucoma is a group of eye diseases that cause blindness by damaging the optic nerve at the back of the eye. Often called "silent thief of sight", it exhibits no symptoms during the early stages. Therefore, early detection is crucial to prevent vision loss. With the rise of Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly Deep Learning (DL) techniques, Computer-Aided Diagnosis (CADx) systems have emerged as promising tools to assist clinicians in accurately diagnosing glaucoma early. This paper aims to provide a comprehensive overview of AI techniques utilized in CADx systems for glaucoma diagnosis. Through a detailed analysis of current literature, we identify key gaps and challenges in these systems, emphasizing the need for improved safety, reliability, interpretability, and explainability. By identifying research gaps, we aim to advance the field of CADx systems especially for the early diagnosis of glaucoma, in order to prevent any potential loss of vision.
Developing Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) based LLM Systems from PDFs: An Experience Report
Authors: Ayman Asad Khan, Md Toufique Hasan, Kai Kristian Kemell, Jussi Rasku, Pekka Abrahamsson
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, RAG, Response Generation, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This paper presents an experience report on the development of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) systems using PDF documents as the primary data source. The RAG architecture combines generative capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) with the precision of information retrieval. This approach has the potential to redefine how we interact with and augment both structured and unstructured knowledge in generative models to enhance transparency, accuracy, and contextuality of responses. The paper details the end-to-end pipeline, from data collection, preprocessing, to retrieval indexing and response generation, highlighting technical challenges and practical solutions. We aim to offer insights to researchers and practitioners developing similar systems using two distinct approaches: OpenAI's Assistant API with GPT Series and Llama's open-source models. The practical implications of this research lie in enhancing the reliability of generative AI systems in various sectors where domain-specific knowledge and real-time information retrieval is important. The Python code used in this work is also available at: https://github.com/GPT-Laboratory/RAG-LLM-Development-Guidebook-from-PDFs.
Centrality-aware Product Retrieval and Ranking
Authors: Hadeel Saadany, Swapnil Bhosale, Samarth Agrawal, Diptesh Kanojia, Constantin Orasan, Zhe Wu
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

This paper addresses the challenge of improving user experience on e-commerce platforms by enhancing product ranking relevant to users' search queries. Ambiguity and complexity of user queries often lead to a mismatch between the user's intent and retrieved product titles or documents. Recent approaches have proposed the use of Transformer-based models, which need millions of annotated query-title pairs during the pre-training stage, and this data often does not take user intent into account. To tackle this, we curate samples from existing datasets at eBay, manually annotated with buyer-centric relevance scores and centrality scores, which reflect how well the product title matches the users' intent. We introduce a User-intent Centrality Optimization (UCO) approach for existing models, which optimises for the user intent in semantic product search. To that end, we propose a dual-loss based optimisation to handle hard negatives, i.e., product titles that are semantically relevant but do not reflect the user's intent. Our contributions include curating challenging evaluation sets and implementing UCO, resulting in significant product ranking efficiency improvements observed for different evaluation metrics. Our work aims to ensure that the most buyer-centric titles for a query are ranked higher, thereby, enhancing the user experience on e-commerce platforms.
GReFEL: Geometry-Aware Reliable Facial Expression Learning under Bias and Imbalanced Data Distribution
Authors: Azmine Toushik Wasi, Taki Hasan Rafi, Raima Islam, Karlo Serbetar, Dong Kyu Chae
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Facial Expression Recognition, Facial Expression Recognition (FER)

Reliable facial expression learning (FEL) involves the effective learning of distinctive facial expression characteristics for more reliable, unbiased and accurate predictions in real-life settings. However, current systems struggle with FEL tasks because of the variance in people's facial expressions due to their unique facial structures, movements, tones, and demographics. Biased and imbalanced datasets compound this challenge, leading to wrong and biased prediction labels. To tackle these, we introduce GReFEL, leveraging Vision Transformers and a facial geometry-aware anchor-based reliability balancing module to combat imbalanced data distributions, bias, and uncertainty in facial expression learning. Integrating local and global data with anchors that learn different facial data points and structural features, our approach adjusts biased and mislabeled emotions caused by intra-class disparity, inter-class similarity, and scale sensitivity, resulting in comprehensive, accurate, and reliable facial expression predictions. Our model outperforms current state-of-the-art methodologies, as demonstrated by extensive experiments on various datasets.
Bench4Merge: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Merging in Realistic Dense Traffic with Micro-Interactive Vehicles
Authors: Zhengming Wang, Junli Wang, Pengfei Li, Zhaohan Li, Chunyang Liu, Bo Zhang, Peng Li, Yilun Chen
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Diversity, Motion Planning

While the capabilities of autonomous driving have advanced rapidly, merging into dense traffic remains a significant challenge, many motion planning methods for this scenario have been proposed but it is hard to evaluate them. Most existing closed-loop simulators rely on rule-based controls for other vehicles, which results in a lack of diversity and randomness, thus failing to accurately assess the motion planning capabilities in highly interactive scenarios. Moreover, traditional evaluation metrics are insufficient for comprehensively evaluating the performance of merging in dense traffic. In response, we proposed a closed-loop evaluation benchmark for assessing motion planning capabilities in merging scenarios. Our approach involves other vehicles trained in large scale datasets with micro-behavioral characteristics that significantly enhance the complexity and diversity. Additionally, we have restructured the evaluation mechanism by leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to assess each autonomous vehicle merging onto the main lane. Extensive experiments and test-vehicle deployment have demonstrated the progressiveness of this benchmark. Through this benchmark, we have obtained an evaluation of existing methods and identified common issues. The simulation environment and evaluation process can be accessed at https://github.com/WZM5853/Bench4Merge.
IGMaxHS -- An Incremental MaxSAT Solver with Support for XOR Clauses
Authors: Ole Lübke
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00

Recently, a novel, MaxSAT-based method for error correction in quantum computing has been proposed that requires both incremental MaxSAT solving capabilities and support for XOR constraints, but no dedicated MaxSAT solver fulfilling these criteria existed yet. We alleviate that and introduce IGMaxHS, which is based on the existing solvers iMaxHS and GaussMaxHS, but poses fewer restrictions on the XOR constraints than GaussMaxHS. IGMaxHS is fuzz tested with xwcnfuzz, an extension of wcnfuzz that can directly output XOR constraints. As a result, IGMaxHS is the only solver that reported neither incorrect unsatisfiability verdicts nor invalid models nor incoherent cost model combinations in a final fuzz testing comparison of all three solvers with 10000 instances. We detail the steps required for implementing Gaussian elimination on XOR constraints in CDCL SAT solvers, and extend the recently proposed re-entrant incremental MaxSAT solver application program interface to allow for incremental addition of XOR constraints. Finally, we show that IGMaxHS is capable of decoding quantum color codes through simulation with the Munich Quantum Toolkit.
Model Mimic Attack: Knowledge Distillation for Provably Transferable Adversarial Examples
Authors: Kirill Lukyanov, Andrew Perminov, Denis Turdakov, Mikhail Pautov
Date: 2024-10-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation

The vulnerability of artificial neural networks to adversarial perturbations in the black-box setting is widely studied in the literature. The majority of attack methods to construct these perturbations suffer from an impractically large number of queries required to find an adversarial example. In this work, we focus on knowledge distillation as an approach to conduct transfer-based black-box adversarial attacks and propose an iterative training of the surrogate model on an expanding dataset. This work is the first, to our knowledge, to provide provable guarantees on the success of knowledge distillation-based attack on classification neural networks: we prove that if the student model has enough learning capabilities, the attack on the teacher model is guaranteed to be found within the finite number of distillation iterations.