pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Artificial intelligence for context-aware visual change detection in software test automation
Authors: Milad Moradi, Ke Yan, David Colwell, Rhona Asgari
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection, software testing

Automated software testing is integral to the software development process, streamlining workflows and ensuring product reliability. Visual testing within this context, especially concerning user interface (UI) and user experience (UX) validation, stands as one of crucial determinants of overall software quality. Nevertheless, conventional methods like pixel-wise comparison and region-based visual change detection fall short in capturing contextual similarities, nuanced alterations, and understanding the spatial relationships between UI elements. In this paper, we introduce a novel graph-based method for visual change detection in software test automation. Leveraging a machine learning model, our method accurately identifies UI controls from software screenshots and constructs a graph representing contextual and spatial relationships between the controls. This information is then used to find correspondence between UI controls within screenshots of different versions of a software. The resulting graph encapsulates the intricate layout of the UI and underlying contextual relations, providing a holistic and context-aware model. This model is finally used to detect and highlight visual regressions in the UI. Comprehensive experiments on different datasets showed that our change detector can accurately detect visual software changes in various simple and complex test scenarios. Moreover, it outperformed pixel-wise comparison and region-based baselines by a large margin in more complex testing scenarios. This work not only contributes to the advancement of visual change detection but also holds practical implications, offering a robust solution for real-world software test automation challenges, enhancing reliability, and ensuring the seamless evolution of software interfaces.
Can a Hallucinating Model help in Reducing Human "Hallucination"?
Authors: Sowmya S Sundaram, Balaji Alwar
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Logical Fallacies, Misconceptions, Misinformation

The prevalence of unwarranted beliefs, spanning pseudoscience, logical fallacies, and conspiracy theories, presents substantial societal hurdles and the risk of disseminating misinformation. Utilizing established psychometric assessments, this study explores the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) vis-a-vis the average human in detecting prevalent logical pitfalls. We undertake a philosophical inquiry, juxtaposing the rationality of humans against that of LLMs. Furthermore, we propose methodologies for harnessing LLMs to counter misconceptions, drawing upon psychological models of persuasion such as cognitive dissonance theory and elaboration likelihood theory. Through this endeavor, we highlight the potential of LLMs as personalized misinformation debunking agents.
Sim-Grasp: Learning 6-DOF Grasp Policies for Cluttered Environments Using a Synthetic Benchmark
Authors: Juncheng Li, David J. Cappelleri
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

In this paper, we present Sim-Grasp, a robust 6-DOF two-finger grasping system that integrates advanced language models for enhanced object manipulation in cluttered environments. We introduce the Sim-Grasp-Dataset, which includes 1,550 objects across 500 scenarios with 7.9 million annotated labels, and develop Sim-GraspNet to generate grasp poses from point clouds. The Sim-Grasp-Polices achieve grasping success rates of 97.14% for single objects and 87.43% and 83.33% for mixed clutter scenarios of Levels 1-2 and Levels 3-4 objects, respectively. By incorporating language models for target identification through text and box prompts, Sim-Grasp enables both object-agnostic and target picking, pushing the boundaries of intelligent robotic systems.
Communication-Efficient Training Workload Balancing for Decentralized Multi-Agent Learning
Authors: Seyed Mahmoud Sajjadi Mohammadabadi, Lei Yang, Feng Yan, Junshan Zhang
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00

Decentralized Multi-agent Learning (DML) enables collaborative model training while preserving data privacy. However, inherent heterogeneity in agents' resources (computation, communication, and task size) may lead to substantial variations in training time. This heterogeneity creates a bottleneck, lengthening the overall training time due to straggler effects and potentially wasting spare resources of faster agents. To minimize training time in heterogeneous environments, we present a Communication-Efficient Training Workload Balancing for Decentralized Multi-Agent Learning (ComDML), which balances the workload among agents through a decentralized approach. Leveraging local-loss split training, ComDML enables parallel updates, where slower agents offload part of their workload to faster agents. To minimize the overall training time, ComDML optimizes the workload balancing by jointly considering the communication and computation capacities of agents, which hinges upon integer programming. A dynamic decentralized pairing scheduler is developed to efficiently pair agents and determine optimal offloading amounts. We prove that in ComDML, both slower and faster agents' models converge, for convex and non-convex functions. Furthermore, extensive experimental results on popular datasets (CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, and CINIC-10) and their non-I.I.D. variants, with large models such as ResNet-56 and ResNet-110, demonstrate that ComDML can significantly reduce the overall training time while maintaining model accuracy, compared to state-of-the-art methods. ComDML demonstrates robustness in heterogeneous environments, and privacy measures can be seamlessly integrated for enhanced data protection.
WorkBench: a Benchmark Dataset for Agents in a Realistic Workplace Setting
Authors: Olly Styles, Sam Miller, Patricio Cerda-Mardini, Tanaya Guha, Victor Sanchez, Bertie Vidgen
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Scheduling

We introduce WorkBench: a benchmark dataset for evaluating agents' ability to execute tasks in a workplace setting. WorkBench contains a sandbox environment with five databases, 26 tools, and 690 tasks. These tasks represent common business activities, such as sending emails and scheduling meetings. The tasks in WorkBench are challenging as they require planning, tool selection, and often multiple actions. If a task has been successfully executed, one (or more) of the database values may change. The correct outcome for each task is unique and unambiguous, which allows for robust, automated evaluation. We call this key contribution outcome-centric evaluation. We evaluate five existing ReAct agents on WorkBench, finding they successfully complete as few as 3% of tasks (Llama2-70B), and just 43% for the best-performing (GPT-4). We further find that agents' errors can result in the wrong action being taken, such as an email being sent to the wrong person. WorkBench reveals weaknesses in agents' ability to undertake common business activities, raising questions about their use in high-stakes workplace settings. WorkBench is publicly available as a free resource at https://github.com/olly-styles/WorkBench.
Obtaining Favorable Layouts for Multiple Object Generation
Authors: Barak Battash, Amit Rozner, Lior Wolf, Ofir Lindenbaum
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Large-scale text-to-image models that can generate high-quality and diverse images based on textual prompts have shown remarkable success. These models aim ultimately to create complex scenes, and addressing the challenge of multi-subject generation is a critical step towards this goal. However, the existing state-of-the-art diffusion models face difficulty when generating images that involve multiple subjects. When presented with a prompt containing more than one subject, these models may omit some subjects or merge them together. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach based on a guiding principle. We allow the diffusion model to initially propose a layout, and then we rearrange the layout grid. This is achieved by enforcing cross-attention maps (XAMs) to adhere to proposed masks and by migrating pixels from latent maps to new locations determined by us. We introduce new loss terms aimed at reducing XAM entropy for clearer spatial definition of subjects, reduce the overlap between XAMs, and ensure that XAMs align with their respective masks. We contrast our approach with several alternative methods and show that it more faithfully captures the desired concepts across a variety of text prompts.
SCAR: Scheduling Multi-Model AI Workloads on Heterogeneous Multi-Chiplet Module Accelerators
Authors: Mohanad Odema, Luke Chen, Hyoukjun Kwon, Mohammad Abdullah Al Faruque
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Scheduling

Emerging multi-model workloads with heavy models like recent large language models significantly increased the compute and memory demands on hardware. To address such increasing demands, designing a scalable hardware architecture became a key problem. Among recent solutions, the 2.5D silicon interposer multi-chip module (MCM)-based AI accelerator has been actively explored as a promising scalable solution due to their significant benefits in the low engineering cost and composability. However, previous MCM accelerators are based on homogeneous architectures with fixed dataflow, which encounter major challenges from highly heterogeneous multi-model workloads due to their limited workload adaptivity. Therefore, in this work, we explore the opportunity in the heterogeneous dataflow MCM AI accelerators. We identify the scheduling of multi-model workload on heterogeneous dataflow MCM AI accelerator is an important and challenging problem due to its significance and scale, which reaches O(10^56) even for a two-model workload on 6x6 chiplets. We develop a set of heuristics to navigate the huge scheduling space and codify them into a scheduler, SCAR, with advanced techniques such as inter-chiplet pipelining. Our evaluation on ten multi-model workload scenarios for datacenter multitenancy and AR/VR use-cases has shown the efficacy of our approach, achieving on average 27.6% and 29.6% less energy-delay product (EDP) for the respective applications settings compared to homogeneous baselines.
Deep Reward Supervisions for Tuning Text-to-Image Diffusion Models
Authors: Xiaoshi Wu, Yiming Hao, Manyuan Zhang, Keqiang Sun, Zhaoyang Huang, Guanglu Song, Yu Liu, Hongsheng Li
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Optimizing a text-to-image diffusion model with a given reward function is an important but underexplored research area. In this study, we propose Deep Reward Tuning (DRTune), an algorithm that directly supervises the final output image of a text-to-image diffusion model and back-propagates through the iterative sampling process to the input noise. We find that training earlier steps in the sampling process is crucial for low-level rewards, and deep supervision can be achieved efficiently and effectively by stopping the gradient of the denoising network input. DRTune is extensively evaluated on various reward models. It consistently outperforms other algorithms, particularly for low-level control signals, where all shallow supervision methods fail. Additionally, we fine-tune Stable Diffusion XL 1.0 (SDXL 1.0) model via DRTune to optimize Human Preference Score v2.1, resulting in the Favorable Diffusion XL 1.0 (FDXL 1.0) model. FDXL 1.0 significantly enhances image quality compared to SDXL 1.0 and reaches comparable quality compared with Midjourney v5.2.
HMAMP: Hypervolume-Driven Multi-Objective Antimicrobial Peptides Design
Authors: Li Wang, Yiping Li, Xiangzheng Fu, Xiucai Ye, Junfeng Shi, Gary G. Yen, Xiangxiang Zeng
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00

Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have exhibited unprecedented potential as biomaterials in combating multidrug-resistant bacteria. Despite the increasing adoption of artificial intelligence for novel AMP design, challenges pertaining to conflicting attributes such as activity, hemolysis, and toxicity have significantly impeded the progress of researchers. This paper introduces a paradigm shift by considering multiple attributes in AMP design. Presented herein is a novel approach termed Hypervolume-driven Multi-objective Antimicrobial Peptide Design (HMAMP), which prioritizes the simultaneous optimization of multiple attributes of AMPs. By synergizing reinforcement learning and a gradient descent algorithm rooted in the hypervolume maximization concept, HMAMP effectively expands exploration space and mitigates the issue of pattern collapse. This method generates a wide array of prospective AMP candidates that strike a balance among diverse attributes. Furthermore, we pinpoint knee points along the Pareto front of these candidate AMPs. Empirical results across five benchmark models substantiate that HMAMP-designed AMPs exhibit competitive performance and heightened diversity. A detailed analysis of the helical structures and molecular dynamics simulations for ten potential candidate AMPs validates the superiority of HMAMP in the realm of multi-objective AMP design. The ability of HMAMP to systematically craft AMPs considering multiple attributes marks a pioneering milestone, establishing a universal computational framework for the multi-objective design of AMPs.
F$^3$low: Frame-to-Frame Coarse-grained Molecular Dynamics with SE(3) Guided Flow Matching
Authors: Shaoning Li, Yusong Wang, Mingyu Li, Jian Zhang, Bin Shao, Nanning Zheng, Jian Tang
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00

Molecular dynamics (MD) is a crucial technique for simulating biological systems, enabling the exploration of their dynamic nature and fostering an understanding of their functions and properties. To address exploration inefficiency, emerging enhanced sampling approaches like coarse-graining (CG) and generative models have been employed. In this work, we propose a \underline{Frame-to-Frame} generative model with guided \underline{Flow}-matching (F$3$low) for enhanced sampling, which (a) extends the domain of CG modeling to the SE(3) Riemannian manifold; (b) retreating CGMD simulations as autoregressively sampling guided by the former frame via flow-matching models; (c) targets the protein backbone, offering improved insights into secondary structure formation and intricate folding pathways. Compared to previous methods, F$3$low allows for broader exploration of conformational space. The ability to rapidly generate diverse conformations via force-free generative paradigm on SE(3) paves the way toward efficient enhanced sampling methods.
From Keyboard to Chatbot: An AI-powered Integration Platform with Large-Language Models for Teaching Computational Thinking for Young Children
Authors: Changjae Lee, JinJun Xiong
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Teaching programming in early childhood (4-9) to enhance computational thinking has gained popularity in the recent movement of computer science for all. However, current practices ignore some fundamental issues resulting from young children's developmental readiness, such as the sustained capability to keyboarding, the decomposition of complex tasks to small tasks, the need for intuitive mapping from abstract programming to tangible outcomes, and the limited amount of screen time exposure. To address these issues in this paper, we present a novel methodology with an AI-powered integration platform to effectively teach computational thinking for young children. The system features a hybrid pedagogy that supports both the top-down and bottom-up approach for teaching computational thinking. Young children can describe their desired task in natural language, while the system can respond with an easy-to-understand program consisting of the right level of decomposed sub-tasks. A tangible robot can immediately execute the decomposed program and demonstrate the program's outcomes to young children. The system is equipped with an intelligent chatbot that can interact with young children through natural languages, and children can speak to the chatbot to complete all the needed programming tasks, while the chatbot orchestrates the execution of the program onto the robot. This would completely eliminates the need of keyboards for young children to program. By developing such a system, we aim to make the concept of computational thinking more accessible to young children, fostering a natural understanding of programming concepts without the need of explicit programming skills. Through the interactive experience provided by the robotic agent, our system seeks to engage children in an effective manner, contributing to the field of educational technology for early childhood computer science education.
ChatGPT in Data Visualization Education: A Student Perspective
Authors: Nam Wook Kim, Hyung-Kwon Ko, Grace Myers, Benjamin Bach
Date: 2024-05-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Visualization, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Unlike traditional educational chatbots that rely on pre-programmed responses, large-language model-driven chatbots, such as ChatGPT, demonstrate remarkable versatility to serve as a dynamic resource for addressing student needs from understanding advanced concepts to solving complex problems. This work explores the impact of such technology on student learning in an interdisciplinary, project-oriented data visualization course. Throughout the semester, students engaged with ChatGPT across four distinct projects, designing and implementing data visualizations using a variety of tools such as Tableau, D3, and Vega-lite. We collected conversation logs and reflection surveys after each assignment and conducted interviews with selected students to gain deeper insights into their experiences with ChatGPT. Our analysis examined the advantages and barriers of using ChatGPT, students' querying behavior, the types of assistance sought, and its impact on assignment outcomes and engagement. We discuss design considerations for an educational solution tailored for data visualization education, extending beyond ChatGPT's basic interface.
Soft Preference Optimization: Aligning Language Models to Expert Distributions
Authors: Arsalan SharifNassab, Saber Salehkaleybar, Sina Ghiassian, Surya Kanoria, Dale Schuurmans
Date: 2024-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

We propose Soft Preference Optimization (SPO), a method for aligning generative models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), with human preferences, without the need for a reward model. SPO optimizes model outputs directly over a preference dataset through a natural loss function that integrates preference loss with a regularization term across the model's entire output distribution rather than limiting it to the preference dataset. Although SPO does not require the assumption of an existing underlying reward model, we demonstrate that, under the Bradley-Terry (BT) model assumption, it converges to a softmax of scaled rewards, with the distribution's "softness" adjustable via the softmax exponent, an algorithm parameter. We showcase SPO's methodology, its theoretical foundation, and its comparative advantages in simplicity, computational efficiency, and alignment precision.
Leveraging Sub-Optimal Data for Human-in-the-Loop Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Calarina Muslimani, Matthew E. Taylor
Date: 2024-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Reinforcement Learning (RL)

To create useful reinforcement learning (RL) agents, step zero is to design a suitable reward function that captures the nuances of the task. However, reward engineering can be a difficult and time-consuming process. Instead, human-in-the-loop RL methods hold the promise of learning reward functions from human feedback. Despite recent successes, many of the human-in-the-loop RL methods still require numerous human interactions to learn successful reward functions. To improve the feedback efficiency of human-in-the-loop RL methods (i.e., require less human interaction), this paper introduces Sub-optimal Data Pre-training, SDP, an approach that leverages reward-free, sub-optimal data to improve scalar- and preference-based RL algorithms. In SDP, we start by pseudo-labeling all low-quality data with the minimum environment reward. Through this process, we obtain reward labels to pre-train our reward model without requiring human labeling or preferences. This pre-training phase provides the reward model a head start in learning, enabling it to recognize that low-quality transitions should be assigned low rewards. Through extensive experiments with both simulated and human teachers, we find that SDP can at least meet, but often significantly improve, state of the art human-in-the-loop RL performance across a variety of simulated robotic tasks.
EEG-MACS: Manifold Attention and Confidence Stratification for EEG-based Cross-Center Brain Disease Diagnosis under Unreliable Annotations
Authors: Zhenxi Song, Ruihan Qin, Huixia Ren, Zhen Liang, Yi Guo, Min Zhang, Zhiguo Zhang
Date: 2024-04-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, EEG

Cross-center data heterogeneity and annotation unreliability significantly challenge the intelligent diagnosis of diseases using brain signals. A notable example is the EEG-based diagnosis of neurodegenerative diseases, which features subtler abnormal neural dynamics typically observed in small-group settings. To advance this area, in this work, we introduce a transferable framework employing Manifold Attention and Confidence Stratification (MACS) to diagnose neurodegenerative disorders based on EEG signals sourced from four centers with unreliable annotations. The MACS framework's effectiveness stems from these features: 1) The Augmentor generates various EEG-represented brain variants to enrich the data space; 2) The Switcher enhances the feature space for trusted samples and reduces overfitting on incorrectly labeled samples; 3) The Encoder uses the Riemannian manifold and Euclidean metrics to capture spatiotemporal variations and dynamic synchronization in EEG; 4) The Projector, equipped with dual heads, monitors consistency across multiple brain variants and ensures diagnostic accuracy; 5) The Stratifier adaptively stratifies learned samples by confidence levels throughout the training process; 6) Forward and backpropagation in MACS are constrained by confidence stratification to stabilize the learning system amid unreliable annotations. Our subject-independent experiments, conducted on both neurocognitive and movement disorders using cross-center corpora, have demonstrated superior performance compared to existing related algorithms. This work not only improves EEG-based diagnostics for cross-center and small-setting brain diseases but also offers insights into extending MACS techniques to other data analyses, tackling data heterogeneity and annotation unreliability in multimedia and multimodal content understanding.