pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Mitigating Relative Over-Generalization in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ting Zhu, Yue Jin, Jeremie Houssineau, Giovanni Montana
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

In decentralized multi-agent reinforcement learning, agents learning in isolation can lead to relative over-generalization (RO), where optimal joint actions are undervalued in favor of suboptimal ones. This hinders effective coordination in cooperative tasks, as agents tend to choose actions that are individually rational but collectively suboptimal. To address this issue, we introduce MaxMax Q-Learning (MMQ), which employs an iterative process of sampling and evaluating potential next states, selecting those with maximal Q-values for learning. This approach refines approximations of ideal state transitions, aligning more closely with the optimal joint policy of collaborating agents. We provide theoretical analysis supporting MMQ's potential and present empirical evaluations across various environments susceptible to RO. Our results demonstrate that MMQ frequently outperforms existing baselines, exhibiting enhanced convergence and sample efficiency.
Reinforcing Competitive Multi-Agents for Playing So Long Sucker
Authors: Medant Sharan, Chandranath Adak
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Deep Reinforcement Learning

This paper examines the use of classical deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms, DQN, DDQN, and Dueling DQN, in the strategy game So Long Sucker (SLS), a diplomacy-driven game defined by coalition-building and strategic betrayal. SLS poses unique challenges due to its blend of cooperative and adversarial dynamics, making it an ideal platform for studying multi-agent learning and game theory. The study's primary goal is to teach autonomous agents the game's rules and strategies using classical DRL methods. To support this effort, the authors developed a novel, publicly available implementation of SLS, featuring a graphical user interface (GUI) and benchmarking tools for DRL algorithms. Experimental results reveal that while considered basic by modern DRL standards, DQN, DDQN, and Dueling DQN agents achieved roughly 50% of the maximum possible game reward. This suggests a baseline understanding of the game's mechanics, with agents favoring legal moves over illegal ones. However, a significant limitation was the extensive training required, around 2000 games, for agents to reach peak performance, compared to human players who grasp the game within a few rounds. Even after prolonged training, agents occasionally made illegal moves, highlighting both the potential and limitations of these classical DRL methods in semi-complex, socially driven games. The findings establish a foundational benchmark for training agents in SLS and similar negotiation-based environments while underscoring the need for advanced or hybrid DRL approaches to improve learning efficiency and adaptability. Future research could incorporate game-theoretic strategies to enhance agent decision-making in dynamic multi-agent contexts.
SRA-MCTS: Self-driven Reasoning Augmentation with Monte Carlo Tree Search for Code Generation
Authors: Bin Xu, Yiguan Lin, Yinghao Li, Yang Gao
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Diversity, Problem Decomposition

Large language models demonstrate exceptional performance in simple code generation tasks but still face challenges in tackling complex problems. These challenges may stem from insufficient reasoning and problem decomposition capabilities. To address this issue, we propose a reasoning-augmented data generation process, SRA-MCTS, which guides the model to autonomously generate high-quality intermediate reasoning paths. This creates a positive feedback loop, enabling continuous improvement. Our method operates entirely through the model itself without requiring additional supervision. By synthesizing natural language reasoning paths and translating them into executable code, the approach ensures analytical accuracy and enhances the success rate in solving complex tasks. Experimental results show that, even without additional supervisory signals, our method achieves performance improvements across different model scales, demonstrating the significant potential of self-improvement in small models. Furthermore, the method remains robust when traditional Chain-of-Thought (CoT) approaches exhibit performance degradation, with notable improvements observed in diversity metrics such as pass@10. We encourage further exploration of reasoning processes within training data to enhance the ability of language models to address complex problems. Our code and data are public at https://github.com/DIRECT-BIT/SRA-MCTS.
Knowledge-enhanced Transformer for Multivariate Long Sequence Time-series Forecasting
Authors: Shubham Tanaji Kakde, Rony Mitra, Jasashwi Mandal, Manoj Kumar Tiwari
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Multivariate Long Sequence Time-series Forecasting (LSTF) has been a critical task across various real-world applications. Recent advancements focus on the application of transformer architectures attributable to their ability to capture temporal patterns effectively over extended periods. However, these approaches often overlook the inherent relationships and interactions between the input variables that could be drawn from their characteristic properties. In this paper, we aim to bridge this gap by integrating information-rich Knowledge Graph Embeddings (KGE) with state-of-the-art transformer-based architectures. We introduce a novel approach that encapsulates conceptual relationships among variables within a well-defined knowledge graph, forming dynamic and learnable KGEs for seamless integration into the transformer architecture. We investigate the influence of this integration into seminal architectures such as PatchTST, Autoformer, Informer, and Vanilla Transformer. Furthermore, we thoroughly investigate the performance of these knowledge-enhanced architectures along with their original implementations for long forecasting horizons and demonstrate significant improvement in the benchmark results. This enhancement empowers transformer-based architectures to address the inherent structural relation between variables. Our knowledge-enhanced approach improves the accuracy of multivariate LSTF by capturing complex temporal and relational dynamics across multiple domains. To substantiate the validity of our model, we conduct comprehensive experiments using Weather and Electric Transformer Temperature (ETT) datasets.
Wafer Map Defect Classification Using Autoencoder-Based Data Augmentation and Convolutional Neural Network
Authors: Yin-Yin Bao, Er-Chao Li, Hong-Qiang Yang, Bin-Bin Jia
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, Defect Detection, Diversity

In semiconductor manufacturing, wafer defect maps (WDMs) play a crucial role in diagnosing issues and enhancing process yields by revealing critical defect patterns. However, accurately categorizing WDM defects presents significant challenges due to noisy data, unbalanced defect classes, and the complexity of failure modes. To address these challenges, this study proposes a novel method combining a self-encoder-based data augmentation technique with a convolutional neural network (CNN). By introducing noise into the latent space, the self-encoder enhances data diversity and mitigates class imbalance, thereby improving the model's generalization capabilities. The augmented dataset is subsequently used to train the CNN, enabling it to deliver precise classification of both common and rare defect patterns. Experimental results on the WM-811K dataset demonstrate that the proposed method achieves a classification accuracy of 98.56%, surpassing Random Forest, SVM, and Logistic Regression by 19%, 21%, and 27%, respectively. These findings highlight the robustness and effectiveness of the proposed approach, offering a reliable solution for wafer defect detection and classification.
BianCang: A Traditional Chinese Medicine Large Language Model
Authors: Sibo Wei, Xueping Peng, Yi-Fei Wang, Jiasheng Si, Weiyu Zhang, Wenpeng Lu, Xiaoming Wu, Yinglong Wang
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, model

The rise of large language models (LLMs) has driven significant progress in medical applications, including traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). However, current medical LLMs struggle with TCM diagnosis and syndrome differentiation due to substantial differences between TCM and modern medical theory, and the scarcity of specialized, high-quality corpora. This paper addresses these challenges by proposing BianCang, a TCM-specific LLM, using a two-stage training process that first injects domain-specific knowledge and then aligns it through targeted stimulation. To enhance diagnostic and differentiation capabilities, we constructed pre-training corpora, instruction-aligned datasets based on real hospital records, and the ChP-TCM dataset derived from the Pharmacopoeia of the People's Republic of China. We compiled extensive TCM and medical corpora for continuous pre-training and supervised fine-tuning, building a comprehensive dataset to refine the model's understanding of TCM. Evaluations across 11 test sets involving 29 models and 4 tasks demonstrate the effectiveness of BianCang, offering valuable insights for future research. Code, datasets, and models are available at https://github.com/QLU-NLP/BianCang.
Time Step Generating: A Universal Synthesized Deepfake Image Detector
Authors: Ziyue Zeng, Haoyuan Liu, Dingjie Peng, Luoxu Jing, Hiroshi Watanabe
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Face Swapping, Image Generation

Currently, high-fidelity text-to-image models are developed in an accelerating pace. Among them, Diffusion Models have led to a remarkable improvement in the quality of image generation, making it vary challenging to distinguish between real and synthesized images. It simultaneously raises serious concerns regarding privacy and security. Some methods are proposed to distinguish the diffusion model generated images through reconstructing. However, the inversion and denoising processes are time-consuming and heavily reliant on the pre-trained generative model. Consequently, if the pre-trained generative model meet the problem of out-of-domain, the detection performance declines. To address this issue, we propose a universal synthetic image detector Time Step Generating (TSG), which does not rely on pre-trained models' reconstructing ability, specific datasets, or sampling algorithms. Our method utilizes a pre-trained diffusion model's network as a feature extractor to capture fine-grained details, focusing on the subtle differences between real and synthetic images. By controlling the time step t of the network input, we can effectively extract these distinguishing detail features. Then, those features can be passed through a classifier (i.e. Resnet), which efficiently detects whether an image is synthetic or real. We test the proposed TSG on the large-scale GenImage benchmark and it achieves significant improvements in both accuracy and generalizability.
BackdoorMBTI: A Backdoor Learning Multimodal Benchmark Tool Kit for Backdoor Defense Evaluation
Authors: Haiyang Yu, Tian Xie, Jiaping Gui, Pengyang Wang, Ping Yi, Yue Wu
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, backdoor defense, Data Poisoning, Diversity, Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Visual Question Answering

Over the past few years, the emergence of backdoor attacks has presented significant challenges to deep learning systems, allowing attackers to insert backdoors into neural networks. When data with a trigger is processed by a backdoor model, it can lead to mispredictions targeted by attackers, whereas normal data yields regular results. The scope of backdoor attacks is expanding beyond computer vision and encroaching into areas such as natural language processing and speech recognition. Nevertheless, existing backdoor defense methods are typically tailored to specific data modalities, restricting their application in multimodal contexts. While multimodal learning proves highly applicable in facial recognition, sentiment analysis, action recognition, visual question answering, the security of these models remains a crucial concern. Specifically, there are no existing backdoor benchmarks targeting multimodal applications or related tasks. In order to facilitate the research in multimodal backdoor, we introduce BackdoorMBTI, the first backdoor learning toolkit and benchmark designed for multimodal evaluation across three representative modalities from eleven commonly used datasets. BackdoorMBTI provides a systematic backdoor learning pipeline, encompassing data processing, data poisoning, backdoor training, and evaluation. The generated poison datasets and backdoor models enable detailed evaluation of backdoor defenses. Given the diversity of modalities, BackdoorMBTI facilitates systematic evaluation across different data types. Furthermore, BackdoorMBTI offers a standardized approach to handling practical factors in backdoor learning, such as issues related to data quality and erroneous labels. We anticipate that BackdoorMBTI will expedite future research in backdoor defense methods within a multimodal context. Code is available at https://github.com/SJTUHaiyangYu/BackdoorMBTI.
Unveiling the Hidden: Online Vectorized HD Map Construction with Clip-Level Token Interaction and Propagation
Authors: Nayeon Kim, Hongje Seong, Daehyun Ji, Sujin Jang
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Online Vectorized HD Map Construction

Predicting and constructing road geometric information (e.g., lane lines, road markers) is a crucial task for safe autonomous driving, while such static map elements can be repeatedly occluded by various dynamic objects on the road. Recent studies have shown significantly improved vectorized high-definition (HD) map construction performance, but there has been insufficient investigation of temporal information across adjacent input frames (i.e., clips), which may lead to inconsistent and suboptimal prediction results. To tackle this, we introduce a novel paradigm of clip-level vectorized HD map construction, MapUnveiler, which explicitly unveils the occluded map elements within a clip input by relating dense image representations with efficient clip tokens. Additionally, MapUnveiler associates inter-clip information through clip token propagation, effectively utilizing long-term temporal map information. MapUnveiler runs efficiently with the proposed clip-level pipeline by avoiding redundant computation with temporal stride while building a global map relationship. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that MapUnveiler achieves state-of-the-art performance on both the nuScenes and Argoverse2 benchmark datasets. We also showcase that MapUnveiler significantly outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in a challenging setting, achieving +10.7% mAP improvement in heavily occluded driving road scenes. The project page can be found at https://mapunveiler.github.io.
Modulating Reservoir Dynamics via Reinforcement Learning for Efficient Robot Skill Synthesis
Authors: Zahra Koulaeizadeh, Erhan Oztop
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

A random recurrent neural network, called a reservoir, can be used to learn robot movements conditioned on context inputs that encode task goals. The Learning is achieved by mapping the random dynamics of the reservoir modulated by context to desired trajectories via linear regression. This makes the reservoir computing (RC) approach computationally efficient as no iterative gradient descent learning is needed. In this work, we propose a novel RC-based Learning from Demonstration (LfD) framework that not only learns to generate the demonstrated movements but also allows online modulation of the reservoir dynamics to generate movement trajectories that are not covered by the initial demonstration set. This is made possible by using a Reinforcement Learning (RL) module that learns a policy to output context as its actions based on the robot state. Considering that the context dimension is typically low, learning with the RL module is very efficient. We show the validity of the proposed model with systematic experiments on a 2 degrees-of-freedom (DOF) simulated robot that is taught to reach targets, encoded as context, with and without obstacle avoidance constraint. The initial data set includes a set of reaching demonstrations which are learned by the reservoir system. To enable reaching out-of-distribution targets, the RL module is engaged in learning a policy to generate dynamic contexts so that the generated trajectory achieves the desired goal without any learning in the reservoir system. Overall, the proposed model uses an initial learned motor primitive set to efficiently generate diverse motor behaviors guided by the designed reward function. Thus the model can be used as a flexible and effective LfD system where the action repertoire can be extended without new data collection.
VidComposition: Can MLLMs Analyze Compositions in Compiled Videos?
Authors: Yunlong Tang, Junjia Guo, Hang Hua, Susan Liang, Mingqian Feng, Xinyang Li, Rui Mao, Chao Huang, Jing Bi, Zeliang Zhang, Pooyan Fazli, Chenliang Xu
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Multiple-choice

The advancement of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) has enabled significant progress in multimodal understanding, expanding their capacity to analyze video content. However, existing evaluation benchmarks for MLLMs primarily focus on abstract video comprehension, lacking a detailed assessment of their ability to understand video compositions, the nuanced interpretation of how visual elements combine and interact within highly compiled video contexts. We introduce VidComposition, a new benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the video composition understanding capabilities of MLLMs using carefully curated compiled videos and cinematic-level annotations. VidComposition includes 982 videos with 1706 multiple-choice questions, covering various compositional aspects such as camera movement, angle, shot size, narrative structure, character actions and emotions, etc. Our comprehensive evaluation of 33 open-source and proprietary MLLMs reveals a significant performance gap between human and model capabilities. This highlights the limitations of current MLLMs in understanding complex, compiled video compositions and offers insights into areas for further improvement. The leaderboard and evaluation code are available at https://yunlong10.github.io/VidComposition/.
SageAttention2: Efficient Attention with Thorough Outlier Smoothing and Per-thread INT4 Quantization
Authors: Jintao Zhang, Haofeng Huang, Pengle Zhang, Jia Wei, Jun Zhu, Jianfei Chen
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Quantization, Video Generation

Although quantization for linear layers has been widely used, its application to accelerate the attention process remains limited. To further enhance the efficiency of attention computation compared to SageAttention while maintaining precision, we propose SageAttention2, which utilizes significantly faster 4-bit matrix multiplication (Matmul) alongside additional precision-enhancing techniques. First, we propose to quantize matrices $(Q, K)$ to INT4 in a hardware-friendly thread-level granularity and quantize matrices $(\widetilde P, V)$ to FP8. Second, we propose a method to smooth $Q$, enhancing the accuracy of INT4 $QK^\top$. Third, we propose a two-level accumulation strategy for $\widetilde PV$ to enhance the accuracy of FP8 $\widetilde PV$. The operations per second (OPS) of SageAttention2 surpass FlashAttention2 and xformers by about 3x and 4.5x on RTX4090, respectively. Moreover, SageAttention2 matches the speed of FlashAttention3(fp8) on the Hopper GPUs, while delivering much higher accuracy. Comprehensive experiments confirm that our approach incurs negligible end-to-end metrics loss across diverse models, including those for language, image, and video generation. The code is available at https://github.com/thu-ml/SageAttention.
IMPaCT GNN: Imposing invariance with Message Passing in Chronological split Temporal Graphs
Authors: Sejun Park, Joo Young Park, Hyunwoo Park
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Graph Learning, Node Classification, Stochastic Block Model

This paper addresses domain adaptation challenges in graph data resulting from chronological splits. In a transductive graph learning setting, where each node is associated with a timestamp, we focus on the task of Semi-Supervised Node Classification (SSNC), aiming to classify recent nodes using labels of past nodes. Temporal dependencies in node connections create domain shifts, causing significant performance degradation when applying models trained on historical data into recent data. Given the practical relevance of this scenario, addressing domain adaptation in chronological split data is crucial, yet underexplored. We propose Imposing invariance with Message Passing in Chronological split Temporal Graphs (IMPaCT), a method that imposes invariant properties based on realistic assumptions derived from temporal graph structures. Unlike traditional domain adaptation approaches which rely on unverifiable assumptions, IMPaCT explicitly accounts for the characteristics of chronological splits. The IMPaCT is further supported by rigorous mathematical analysis, including a derivation of an upper bound of the generalization error. Experimentally, IMPaCT achieves a 3.8% performance improvement over current SOTA method on the ogbn-mag graph dataset. Additionally, we introduce the Temporal Stochastic Block Model (TSBM), which replicates temporal graphs under varying conditions, demonstrating the applicability of our methods to general spatial GNNs.
Learn from Downstream and Be Yourself in Multimodal Large Language Model Fine-Tuning
Authors: Wenke Huang, Jian Liang, Zekun Shi, Didi Zhu, Guancheng Wan, He Li, Bo Du, DaCheng Tao, Mang Ye
Date: 2024-11-17 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Captioning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model, Question Answering, Visual Question Answering

Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) have demonstrated strong generalization capabilities across diverse distributions and tasks, largely due to extensive pre-training datasets. Fine-tuning MLLM has become a common practice to improve performance on specific downstream tasks. However, during fine-tuning, MLLM often faces the risk of forgetting knowledge acquired during pre-training, which can result in a decline in generalization abilities. To balance the trade-off between generalization and specialization, we propose measuring the parameter importance for both pre-trained and fine-tuning distributions, based on frozen pre-trained weight magnitude and accumulated fine-tuning gradient values. We further apply an importance-aware weight allocation strategy, selectively updating relatively important parameters for downstream tasks. We conduct empirical evaluations on both image captioning and visual question-answering tasks using various MLLM architectures. The comprehensive experimental analysis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed solution, highlighting the efficiency of the crucial modules in enhancing downstream specialization performance while mitigating generalization degradation in MLLM Fine-Tuning.