pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Layout Generation Agents with Large Language Models
Authors: Yuichi Sasazawa, Yasuhiro Sogawa
Date: 2024-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Layout Generation, Multimodal Large Language Model

In recent years, there has been an increasing demand for customizable 3D virtual spaces. Due to the significant human effort required to create these virtual spaces, there is a need for efficiency in virtual space creation. While existing studies have proposed methods for automatically generating layouts such as floor plans and furniture arrangements, these methods only generate text indicating the layout structure based on user instructions, without utilizing the information obtained during the generation process. In this study, we propose an agent-driven layout generation system using the GPT-4V multimodal large language model and validate its effectiveness. Specifically, the language model manipulates agents to sequentially place objects in the virtual space, thus generating layouts that reflect user instructions. Experimental results confirm that our proposed method can generate virtual spaces reflecting user instructions with a high success rate. Additionally, we successfully identified elements contributing to the improvement in behavior generation performance through ablation study.
A LLM-based Controllable, Scalable, Human-Involved User Simulator Framework for Conversational Recommender Systems
Authors: Lixi Zhu, Xiaowen Huang, Jitao Sang
Date: 2024-05-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Conversational Recommender System (CRS) leverages real-time feedback from users to dynamically model their preferences, thereby enhancing the system's ability to provide personalized recommendations and improving the overall user experience. CRS has demonstrated significant promise, prompting researchers to concentrate their efforts on developing user simulators that are both more realistic and trustworthy. The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) has marked the onset of a new epoch in computational capabilities, exhibiting human-level intelligence in various tasks. Research efforts have been made to utilize LLMs for building user simulators to evaluate the performance of CRS. Although these efforts showcase innovation, they are accompanied by certain limitations. In this work, we introduce a Controllable, Scalable, and Human-Involved (CSHI) simulator framework that manages the behavior of user simulators across various stages via a plugin manager. CSHI customizes the simulation of user behavior and interactions to provide a more lifelike and convincing user interaction experience. Through experiments and case studies in two conversational recommendation scenarios, we show that our framework can adapt to a variety of conversational recommendation settings and effectively simulate users' personalized preferences. Consequently, our simulator is able to generate feedback that closely mirrors that of real users. This facilitates a reliable assessment of existing CRS studies and promotes the creation of high-quality conversational recommendation datasets.
Iris: An AI-Driven Virtual Tutor For Computer Science Education
Authors: Patrick Bassner, Eduard Frankford, Stephan Krusche
Date: 2024-05-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Integrating AI-driven tools in higher education is an emerging area with transformative potential. This paper introduces Iris, a chat-based virtual tutor integrated into the interactive learning platform Artemis that offers personalized, context-aware assistance in large-scale educational settings. Iris supports computer science students by guiding them through programming exercises and is designed to act as a tutor in a didactically meaningful way. Its calibrated assistance avoids revealing complete solutions, offering subtle hints or counter-questions to foster independent problem-solving skills. For each question, it issues multiple prompts in a Chain-of-Thought to GPT-3.5-Turbo. The prompts include a tutor role description and examples of meaningful answers through few-shot learning. Iris employs contextual awareness by accessing the problem statement, student code, and automated feedback to provide tailored advice. An empirical evaluation shows that students perceive Iris as effective because it understands their questions, provides relevant support, and contributes to the learning process. While students consider Iris a valuable tool for programming exercises and homework, they also feel confident solving programming tasks in computer-based exams without Iris. The findings underscore students' appreciation for Iris' immediate and personalized support, though students predominantly view it as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, human tutors. Nevertheless, Iris creates a space for students to ask questions without being judged by others.
Enhancing Airline Customer Satisfaction: A Machine Learning and Causal Analysis Approach
Authors: Tejas Mirthipati
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

This study explores the enhancement of customer satisfaction in the airline industry, a critical factor for retaining customers and building brand reputation, which are vital for revenue growth. Utilizing a combination of machine learning and causal inference methods, we examine the specific impact of service improvements on customer satisfaction, with a focus on the online boarding pass experience. Through detailed data analysis involving several predictive and causal models, we demonstrate that improvements in the digital aspects of customer service significantly elevate overall customer satisfaction. This paper highlights how airlines can strategically leverage these insights to make data-driven decisions that enhance customer experiences and, consequently, their market competitiveness.
ParaNames 1.0: Creating an Entity Name Corpus for 400+ Languages using Wikidata
Authors: Jonne Sälevä, Constantine Lignos
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Multilingual Named Entity Recognition, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition, Translation, Transliteration

We introduce ParaNames, a massively multilingual parallel name resource consisting of 140 million names spanning over 400 languages. Names are provided for 16.8 million entities, and each entity is mapped from a complex type hierarchy to a standard type (PER/LOC/ORG). Using Wikidata as a source, we create the largest resource of this type to date. We describe our approach to filtering and standardizing the data to provide the best quality possible. ParaNames is useful for multilingual language processing, both in defining tasks for name translation/transliteration and as supplementary data for tasks such as named entity recognition and linking. We demonstrate the usefulness of ParaNames on two tasks. First, we perform canonical name translation between English and 17 other languages. Second, we use it as a gazetteer for multilingual named entity recognition, obtaining performance improvements on all 10 languages evaluated.
Wearable Sensor-Based Few-Shot Continual Learning on Hand Gestures for Motor-Impaired Individuals via Latent Embedding Exploitation
Authors: Riyad Bin Rafiq, Weishi Shi, Mark V. Albert
Date: 2024-05-14 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Gesture Recognition, Hand Gesture Recognition, Hand-Gesture Recognition

Hand gestures can provide a natural means of human-computer interaction and enable people who cannot speak to communicate efficiently. Existing hand gesture recognition methods heavily depend on pre-defined gestures, however, motor-impaired individuals require new gestures tailored to each individual's gesture motion and style. Gesture samples collected from different persons have distribution shifts due to their health conditions, the severity of the disability, motion patterns of the arms, etc. In this paper, we introduce the Latent Embedding Exploitation (LEE) mechanism in our replay-based Few-Shot Continual Learning (FSCL) framework that significantly improves the performance of fine-tuning a model for out-of-distribution data. Our method produces a diversified latent feature space by leveraging a preserved latent embedding known as gesture prior knowledge, along with intra-gesture divergence derived from two additional embeddings. Thus, the model can capture latent statistical structure in highly variable gestures with limited samples. We conduct an experimental evaluation using the SmartWatch Gesture and the Motion Gesture datasets. The proposed method results in an average test accuracy of 57.0%, 64.6%, and 69.3% by using one, three, and five samples for six different gestures. Our method helps motor-impaired persons leverage wearable devices, and their unique styles of movement can be learned and applied in human-computer interaction and social communication. Code is available at: https://github.com/riyadRafiq/wearable-latent-embedding-exploitation
Positional Knowledge is All You Need: Position-induced Transformer (PiT) for Operator Learning
Authors: Junfeng Chen, Kailiang Wu
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: All, Operator learning, Position

Operator learning for Partial Differential Equations (PDEs) is rapidly emerging as a promising approach for surrogate modeling of intricate systems. Transformers with the self-attention mechanism$\unicode{x2013}$a powerful tool originally designed for natural language processing$\unicode{x2013}$have recently been adapted for operator learning. However, they confront challenges, including high computational demands and limited interpretability. This raises a critical question: Is there a more efficient attention mechanism for Transformer-based operator learning? This paper proposes the Position-induced Transformer (PiT), built on an innovative position-attention mechanism, which demonstrates significant advantages over the classical self-attention in operator learning. Position-attention draws inspiration from numerical methods for PDEs. Different from self-attention, position-attention is induced by only the spatial interrelations of sampling positions for input functions of the operators, and does not rely on the input function values themselves, thereby greatly boosting efficiency. PiT exhibits superior performance over current state-of-the-art neural operators in a variety of complex operator learning tasks across diverse PDE benchmarks. Additionally, PiT possesses an enhanced discretization convergence feature, compared to the widely-used Fourier neural operator.
Energy-Efficient Sleep Mode Optimization of 5G mmWave Networks Using Deep Contextual MAB
Authors: Saad Masrur, Ismail Guvenc, David Lopez-Perez
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: All

Millimeter-wave (mmWave) networks, integral to 5G communication, offer a vast spectrum that addresses the issue of spectrum scarcity and enhances peak rate and capacity. However, their dense deployment, necessary to counteract propagation losses, leads to high power consumption. An effective strategy to reduce this energy consumption in mobile networks is the sleep mode optimization (SMO) of base stations (BSs). In this paper, we propose a novel SMO approach for mmWave BSs in a 3D urban environment. This approach, which incorporates a neural network (NN) based contextual multi-armed bandit (C-MAB) with an epsilon decay algorithm, accommodates the dynamic and diverse traffic of user equipment (UE) by clustering the UEs in their respective tracking areas (TAs). Our strategy includes beamforming, which helps reduce energy consumption from the UE side, while SMO minimizes energy use from the BS perspective. We extended our investigation to include Random, Epsilon Greedy, Upper Confidence Bound (UCB), and Load Based sleep mode (SM) strategies. We compared the performance of our proposed C-MAB based SM algorithm with those of All On and other alternative approaches. Simulation results show that our proposed method outperforms all other SM strategies in terms of the $10^{th}$ percentile of user rate and average throughput while demonstrating comparable average throughput to the All On approach. Importantly, it outperforms all approaches in terms of energy efficiency (EE).
Declarative Design of Neural Predicates in Neuro-Symbolic Systems
Authors: Tilman Hinnerichs, Robin Manhaeve, Giuseppe Marra, Sebastijan Dumancic
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00

Neuro-symbolic systems (NeSy), which claim to combine the best of both learning and reasoning capabilities of artificial intelligence, are missing a core property of reasoning systems: Declarativeness. The lack of declarativeness is caused by the functional nature of neural predicates inherited from neural networks. We propose and implement a general framework for fully declarative neural predicates, which hence extends to fully declarative NeSy frameworks. We first show that the declarative extension preserves the learning and reasoning capabilities while being able to answer arbitrary queries while only being trained on a single query type.
QueryNER: Segmentation of E-commerce Queries
Authors: Chester Palen-Michel, Lizzie Liang, Zhe Wu, Constantine Lignos
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation

We present QueryNER, a manually-annotated dataset and accompanying model for e-commerce query segmentation. Prior work in sequence labeling for e-commerce has largely addressed aspect-value extraction which focuses on extracting portions of a product title or query for narrowly defined aspects. Our work instead focuses on the goal of dividing a query into meaningful chunks with broadly applicable types. We report baseline tagging results and conduct experiments comparing token and entity dropping for null and low recall query recovery. Challenging test sets are created using automatic transformations and show how simple data augmentation techniques can make the models more robust to noise. We make the QueryNER dataset publicly available.
Harmonizing Human Insights and AI Precision: Hand in Hand for Advancing Knowledge Graph Task
Authors: Shurong Wang, Yufei Zhang, Xuliang Huang, Hongwei Wang
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Link Prediction

Knowledge graph embedding (KGE) has caught significant interest for its effectiveness in knowledge graph completion (KGC), specifically link prediction (LP), with recent KGE models cracking the LP benchmarks. Despite the rapidly growing literature, insufficient attention has been paid to the cooperation between humans and AI on KG. However, humans' capability to analyze graphs conceptually may further improve the efficacy of KGE models with semantic information. To this effect, we carefully designed a human-AI team (HAIT) system dubbed KG-HAIT, which harnesses the human insights on KG by leveraging fully human-designed ad-hoc dynamic programming (DP) on KG to produce human insightful feature (HIF) vectors that capture the subgraph structural feature and semantic similarities. By integrating HIF vectors into the training of KGE models, notable improvements are observed across various benchmarks and metrics, accompanied by accelerated model convergence. Our results underscore the effectiveness of human-designed DP in the task of LP, emphasizing the pivotal role of collaboration between humans and AI on KG. We open avenues for further exploration and innovation through KG-HAIT, paving the way towards more effective and insightful KG analysis techniques.
Fourier Boundary Features Network with Wider Catchers for Glass Segmentation
Authors: Xiaolin Qin, Jiacen Liu, Qianlei Wang, Shaolin Zhang, Fei Zhu, Zhang Yi
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Glass largely blurs the boundary between the real world and the reflection. The special transmittance and reflectance quality have confused the semantic tasks related to machine vision. Therefore, how to clear the boundary built by glass, and avoid over-capturing features as false positive information in deep structure, matters for constraining the segmentation of reflection surface and penetrating glass. We proposed the Fourier Boundary Features Network with Wider Catchers (FBWC), which might be the first attempt to utilize sufficiently wide horizontal shallow branches without vertical deepening for guiding the fine granularity segmentation boundary through primary glass semantic information. Specifically, we designed the Wider Coarse-Catchers (WCC) for anchoring large area segmentation and reducing excessive extraction from a structural perspective. We embed fine-grained features by Cross Transpose Attention (CTA), which is introduced to avoid the incomplete area within the boundary caused by reflection noise. For excavating glass features and balancing high-low layers context, a learnable Fourier Convolution Controller (FCC) is proposed to regulate information integration robustly. The proposed method has been validated on three different public glass segmentation datasets. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method yields better segmentation performance compared with the state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods in glass image segmentation.
Desk-AId: Humanitarian Aid Desk Assessment with Geospatial AI for Predicting Landmine Areas
Authors: Flavio Cirillo, Gürkan Solmaz, Yi-Hsuan Peng, Christian Bizer, Martin Jebens
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Humanitarian, Landmine

The process of clearing areas, namely demining, starts by assessing and prioritizing potential hazardous areas (i.e., desk assessment) to go under thorough investigation of experts, who confirm the risk and proceed with the mines clearance operations. This paper presents Desk-AId that supports the desk assessment phase by estimating landmine risks using geospatial data and socioeconomic information. Desk-AId uses a Geospatial AI approach specialized to landmines. The approach includes mixed data sampling strategies and context-enrichment by historical conflicts and key multi-domain facilities (e.g., buildings, roads, health sites). The proposed system addresses the issue of having only ground-truth for confirmed hazardous areas by implementing a new hard-negative data sampling strategy, where negative points are sampled in the vicinity of hazardous areas. Experiments validate Desk-Aid in two domains for landmine risk assessment: 1) country-wide, and 2) uncharted study areas). The proposed approach increases the estimation accuracies up to 92%, for different classification models such as RandomForest (RF), Feedforward Neural Networks (FNN), and Graph Neural Networks (GNN).
Facilitating Opinion Diversity through Hybrid NLP Approaches
Authors: Michiel van der Meer
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diversity

Modern democracies face a critical issue of declining citizen participation in decision-making. Online discussion forums are an important avenue for enhancing citizen participation. This thesis proposal 1) identifies the challenges involved in facilitating large-scale online discussions with Natural Language Processing (NLP), 2) suggests solutions to these challenges by incorporating hybrid human-AI technologies, and 3) investigates what these technologies can reveal about individual perspectives in online discussions. We propose a three-layered hierarchy for representing perspectives that can be obtained by a mixture of human intelligence and large language models. We illustrate how these representations can draw insights into the diversity of perspectives and allow us to investigate interactions in online discussions.
On the Correspondence of Non-flat Assumption-based Argumentation and Logic Programming with Negation as Failure in the Head
Authors: Anna Rapberger, Markus Ulbricht, Francesca Toni
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Negation, Relation

The relation between (a fragment of) assumption-based argumentation (ABA) and logic programs (LPs) under stable model semantics is well-studied. However, for obtaining this relation, the ABA framework needs to be restricted to being flat, i.e., a fragment where the (defeasible) assumptions can never be entailed, only assumed to be true or false. Here, we remove this restriction and show a correspondence between non-flat ABA and LPs with negation as failure in their head. We then extend this result to so-called set-stable ABA semantics, originally defined for the fragment of non-flat ABA called bipolar ABA. We showcase how to define set-stable semantics for LPs with negation as failure in their head and show the correspondence to set-stable ABA semantics.
$O_2$ is a multiple context-free grammar: an implementation-, formalisation-friendly proof
Authors: Marco B. Caminati
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00

Classifying formal languages according to the expressiveness of grammars able to generate them is a fundamental problem in computational linguistics and, therefore, in the theory of computation. Furthermore, such kind of analysis can give insight into the classification of abstract algebraic structure such as groups, for example through the correspondence given by the word problem. While many such classification problems remain open, others have been settled. Recently, it was proved that $n$-balanced languages (i.e., whose strings contain the same occurrences of letters $a_i$ and $A_i$ with $1\leq i \leq n$) can be generated by multiple context-free grammars (MCFGs), which are one of the several slight extensions of context free grammars added to the classical Chomsky hierarchy to make the mentioned classification more precise. This paper analyses the existing proofs from the computational and the proof-theoretical point of views, systematically studying whether each proof can lead to a verified (i.e., checked by a proof assistant) algorithm parsing balanced languages via MCFGs. We conclude that none of the existing proofs is realistically suitable against this practical goal, and proceed to provide a radically new, elementary, extremely short proof for the crucial case $n \leq 2$. A comparative analysis with respect to the existing proofs is finally performed to justify why the proposed proof is a substantial step towards concretely obtaining a verified parsing algorithm for $O_2$.
Matching domain experts by training from scratch on domain knowledge
Authors: Xiaoliang Luo, Guangzhi Sun, Bradley C. Love
Date: 2024-05-15 00:00:00

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have outperformed human experts in predicting the results of neuroscience experiments (Luo et al., 2024). What is the basis for this performance? One possibility is that statistical patterns in that specific scientific literature, as opposed to emergent reasoning abilities arising from broader training, underlie LLMs' performance. To evaluate this possibility, we trained (next word prediction) a relatively small 124M-parameter GPT-2 model on 1.3 billion tokens of domain-specific knowledge. Despite being orders of magnitude smaller than larger LLMs trained on trillions of tokens, small models achieved expert-level performance in predicting neuroscience results. Small models trained on the neuroscience literature succeeded when they were trained from scratch using a tokenizer specifically trained on neuroscience text or when the neuroscience literature was used to finetune a pretrained GPT-2. Our results indicate that expert-level performance may be attained by even small LLMs through domain-specific, auto-regressive training approaches.