pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Self-supervised Spatio-Temporal Graph Mask-Passing Attention Network for Perceptual Importance Prediction of Multi-point Tactility
Authors: Dazhong He, Qian Liu
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Self-Supervised Learning

While visual and auditory information are prevalent in modern multimedia systems, haptic interaction, e.g., tactile and kinesthetic interaction, provides a unique form of human perception. However, multimedia technology for contact interaction is less mature than non-contact multimedia technologies and requires further development. Specialized haptic media technologies, requiring low latency and bitrates, are essential to enable haptic interaction, necessitating haptic information compression. Existing vibrotactile signal compression methods, based on the perceptual model, do not consider the characteristics of fused tactile perception at multiple spatially distributed interaction points. In fact, differences in tactile perceptual importance are not limited to conventional frequency and time domains, but also encompass differences in the spatial locations on the skin unique to tactile perception. For the most frequently used tactile information, vibrotactile texture perception, we have developed a model to predict its perceptual importance at multiple points, based on self-supervised learning and Spatio-Temporal Graph Neural Network. Current experimental results indicate that this model can effectively predict the perceptual importance of various points in multi-point tactile perception scenarios.
EB-NeRD: A Large-Scale Dataset for News Recommendation
Authors: Johannes Kruse, Kasper Lindskow, Saikishore Kalloori, Marco Polignano, Claudio Pomo, Abhishek Srivastava, Anshuk Uppal, Michael Riis Andersen, Jes Frellsen
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, News Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Personalized content recommendations have been pivotal to the content experience in digital media from video streaming to social networks. However, several domain specific challenges have held back adoption of recommender systems in news publishing. To address these challenges, we introduce the Ekstra Bladet News Recommendation Dataset (EB-NeRD). The dataset encompasses data from over a million unique users and more than 37 million impression logs from Ekstra Bladet. It also includes a collection of over 125,000 Danish news articles, complete with titles, abstracts, bodies, and metadata, such as categories. EB-NeRD served as the benchmark dataset for the RecSys '24 Challenge, where it was demonstrated how the dataset can be used to address both technical and normative challenges in designing effective and responsible recommender systems for news publishing. The dataset is available at: https://recsys.eb.dk.
Cayley Graph Propagation
Authors: JJ Wilson, Maya Bechler-Speicher, Petar Veličković
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00

In spite of the plethora of success stories with graph neural networks (GNNs) on modelling graph-structured data, they are notoriously vulnerable to over-squashing, whereby tasks necessitate the mixing of information between distance pairs of nodes. To address this problem, prior work suggests rewiring the graph structure to improve information flow. Alternatively, a significant body of research has dedicated itself to discovering and precomputing bottleneck-free graph structures to ameliorate over-squashing. One well regarded family of bottleneck-free graphs within the mathematical community are expander graphs, with prior work -- Expander Graph Propagation (EGP) -- proposing the use of a well-known expander graph family -- the Cayley graphs of the $\mathrm{SL}(2,\mathbb{Z}_n)$ special linear group -- as a computational template for GNNs. However, in EGP the computational graphs used are truncated to align with a given input graph. In this work, we show that truncation is detrimental to the coveted expansion properties. Instead, we propose CGP, a method to propagate information over a complete Cayley graph structure, thereby ensuring it is bottleneck-free to better alleviate over-squashing. Our empirical evidence across several real-world datasets not only shows that CGP recovers significant improvements as compared to EGP, but it is also akin to or outperforms computationally complex graph rewiring techniques.
One2set + Large Language Model: Best Partners for Keyphrase Generation
Authors: Liangying Shao, Liang Zhang, Minlong Peng, Guoqi Ma, Hao Yue, Mingming Sun, Jinsong Su
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyphrase Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Keyphrase generation (KPG) aims to automatically generate a collection of phrases representing the core concepts of a given document. The dominant paradigms in KPG include one2seq and one2set. Recently, there has been increasing interest in applying large language models (LLMs) to KPG. Our preliminary experiments reveal that it is challenging for a single model to excel in both recall and precision. Further analysis shows that: 1) the one2set paradigm owns the advantage of high recall, but suffers from improper assignments of supervision signals during training; 2) LLMs are powerful in keyphrase selection, but existing selection methods often make redundant selections. Given these observations, we introduce a generate-then-select framework decomposing KPG into two steps, where we adopt a one2set-based model as generator to produce candidates and then use an LLM as selector to select keyphrases from these candidates. Particularly, we make two important improvements on our generator and selector: 1) we design an Optimal Transport-based assignment strategy to address the above improper assignments; 2) we model the keyphrase selection as a sequence labeling task to alleviate redundant selections. Experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets show that our framework significantly surpasses state-of-the-art models, especially in absent keyphrase prediction.
Towards Real-time Intrahepatic Vessel Identification in Intraoperative Ultrasound-Guided Liver Surgery
Authors: Karl-Philippe Beaudet, Alexandros Karargyris, Sidaty El Hadramy, Stéphane Cotin, Jean-Paul Mazellier, Nicolas Padoy, Juan Verde
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00

While laparoscopic liver resection is less prone to complications and maintains patient outcomes compared to traditional open surgery, its complexity hinders widespread adoption due to challenges in representing the liver's internal structure. Laparoscopic intraoperative ultrasound offers efficient, cost-effective and radiation-free guidance. Our objective is to aid physicians in identifying internal liver structures using laparoscopic intraoperative ultrasound. We propose a patient-specific approach using preoperative 3D ultrasound liver volume to train a deep learning model for real-time identification of portal tree and branch structures. Our personalized AI model, validated on ex vivo swine livers, achieved superior precision (0.95) and recall (0.93) compared to surgeons, laying groundwork for precise vessel identification in ultrasound-based liver resection. Its adaptability and potential clinical impact promise to advance surgical interventions and improve patient care.
Comparative study of regression vs pairwise models for surrogate-based heuristic optimisation
Authors: Pablo S. Naharro, Pablo Toharia, Antonio LaTorre, José-María Peña
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00

Heuristic optimisation algorithms explore the search space by sampling solutions, evaluating their fitness, and biasing the search in the direction of promising solutions. However, in many cases, this fitness function involves executing expensive computational calculations, drastically reducing the reasonable number of evaluations. In this context, surrogate models have emerged as an excellent alternative to alleviate these computational problems. This paper addresses the formulation of surrogate problems as both regression models that approximate fitness (surface surrogate models) and a novel way to connect classification models (pairwise surrogate models). The pairwise approach can be directly exploited by some algorithms, such as Differential Evolution, in which the fitness value is not actually needed to drive the search, and it is sufficient to know whether a solution is better than another one or not. Based on these modelling approaches, we have conducted a multidimensional analysis of surrogate models under different configurations: different machine learning algorithms (regularised regression, neural networks, decision trees, boosting methods, and random forests), different surrogate strategies (encouraging diversity or relaxing prediction thresholds), and compare them for both surface and pairwise surrogate models. The experimental part of the article includes the benchmark problems already proposed for the SOCO2011 competition in continuous optimisation and a simulation problem included in the recent GECCO2021 Industrial Challenge. This paper shows that the performance of the overall search, when using online machine learning-based surrogate models, depends not only on the accuracy of the predictive model but also on both the kind of bias towards positive or negative cases and how the optimisation uses those predictions to decide whether to execute the actual fitness function.
EBES: Easy Benchmarking for Event Sequences
Authors: Dmitry Osin, Igor Udovichenko, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Egor Shvetsov, Evgeny Burnaev
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Event sequences, characterized by irregular sampling intervals and a mix of categorical and numerical features, are common data structures in various real-world domains such as healthcare, finance, and user interaction logs. Despite advances in temporal data modeling techniques, there is no standardized benchmarks for evaluating their performance on event sequences. This complicates result comparison across different papers due to varying evaluation protocols, potentially misleading progress in this field. We introduce EBES, a comprehensive benchmarking tool with standardized evaluation scenarios and protocols, focusing on regression and classification problems with sequence-level targets. Our library simplifies benchmarking, dataset addition, and method integration through a unified interface. It includes a novel synthetic dataset and provides preprocessed real-world datasets, including the largest publicly available banking dataset. Our results provide an in-depth analysis of datasets, identifying some as unsuitable for model comparison. We investigate the importance of modeling temporal and sequential components, as well as the robustness and scaling properties of the models. These findings highlight potential directions for future research. Our benchmark aim is to facilitate reproducible research, expediting progress and increasing real-world impacts.
GraphCroc: Cross-Correlation Autoencoder for Graph Structural Reconstruction
Authors: Shijin Duan, Ruyi Ding, Jiaxing He, Aidong Adam Ding, Yunsi Fei, Xiaolin Xu
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00

Graph-structured data is integral to many applications, prompting the development of various graph representation methods. Graph autoencoders (GAEs), in particular, reconstruct graph structures from node embeddings. Current GAE models primarily utilize self-correlation to represent graph structures and focus on node-level tasks, often overlooking multi-graph scenarios. Our theoretical analysis indicates that self-correlation generally falls short in accurately representing specific graph features such as islands, symmetrical structures, and directional edges, particularly in smaller or multiple graph contexts. To address these limitations, we introduce a cross-correlation mechanism that significantly enhances the GAE representational capabilities. Additionally, we propose GraphCroc, a new GAE that supports flexible encoder architectures tailored for various downstream tasks and ensures robust structural reconstruction, through a mirrored encoding-decoding process. This model also tackles the challenge of representation bias during optimization by implementing a loss-balancing strategy. Both theoretical analysis and numerical evaluations demonstrate that our methodology significantly outperforms existing self-correlation-based GAEs in graph structure reconstruction.
Identifying biological perturbation targets through causal differential networks
Authors: Menghua Wu, Umesh Padia, Sean H. Murphy, Regina Barzilay, Tommi Jaakkola
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery

Identifying variables responsible for changes to a biological system enables applications in drug target discovery and cell engineering. Given a pair of observational and interventional datasets, the goal is to isolate the subset of observed variables that were the targets of the intervention. Directly applying causal discovery algorithms is challenging: the data may contain thousands of variables with as few as tens of samples per intervention, and biological systems do not adhere to classical causality assumptions. We propose a causality-inspired approach to address this practical setting. First, we infer noisy causal graphs from the observational and interventional data. Then, we learn to map the differences between these graphs, along with additional statistical features, to sets of variables that were intervened upon. Both modules are jointly trained in a supervised framework, on simulated and real data that reflect the nature of biological interventions. This approach consistently outperforms baselines for perturbation modeling on seven single-cell transcriptomics datasets. We also demonstrate significant improvements over current causal discovery methods for predicting soft and hard intervention targets across a variety of synthetic data.
Mitigating Adversarial Perturbations for Deep Reinforcement Learning via Vector Quantization
Authors: Tung M. Luu, Thanh Nguyen, Tee Joshua Tian Jin, Sungwoon Kim, Chang D. Yoo
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Quantization, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent studies reveal that well-performing reinforcement learning (RL) agents in training often lack resilience against adversarial perturbations during deployment. This highlights the importance of building a robust agent before deploying it in the real world. Most prior works focus on developing robust training-based procedures to tackle this problem, including enhancing the robustness of the deep neural network component itself or adversarially training the agent on strong attacks. In this work, we instead study an input transformation-based defense for RL. Specifically, we propose using a variant of vector quantization (VQ) as a transformation for input observations, which is then used to reduce the space of adversarial attacks during testing, resulting in the transformed observations being less affected by attacks. Our method is computationally efficient and seamlessly integrates with adversarial training, further enhancing the robustness of RL agents against adversarial attacks. Through extensive experiments in multiple environments, we demonstrate that using VQ as the input transformation effectively defends against adversarial attacks on the agent's observations.
SoundSignature: What Type of Music Do You Like?
Authors: Brandon James Carone, Pablo Ripollés
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot, Chord Recognition, Information Retrieval, Music Information Retrieval

SoundSignature is a music application that integrates a custom OpenAI Assistant to analyze users' favorite songs. The system incorporates state-of-the-art Music Information Retrieval (MIR) Python packages to combine extracted acoustic/musical features with the assistant's extensive knowledge of the artists and bands. Capitalizing on this combined knowledge, SoundSignature leverages semantic audio and principles from the emerging Internet of Sounds (IoS) ecosystem, integrating MIR with AI to provide users with personalized insights into the acoustic properties of their music, akin to a musical preference personality report. Users can then interact with the chatbot to explore deeper inquiries about the acoustic analyses performed and how they relate to their musical taste. This interactivity transforms the application, acting not only as an informative resource about familiar and/or favorite songs, but also as an educational platform that enables users to deepen their understanding of musical features, music theory, acoustic properties commonly used in signal processing, and the artists behind the music. Beyond general usability, the application also incorporates several well-established open-source musician-specific tools, such as a chord recognition algorithm (CREMA), a source separation algorithm (DEMUCS), and an audio-to-MIDI converter (basic-pitch). These features allow users without coding skills to access advanced, open-source music processing algorithms simply by interacting with the chatbot (e.g., can you give me the stems of this song?). In this paper, we highlight the application's innovative features and educational potential, and present findings from a pilot user study that evaluates its efficacy and usability.
Make Interval Bound Propagation great again
Authors: Patryk Krukowski, Daniel Wilczak, Jacek Tabor, Anna Bielawska, Przemysław Spurek
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving

In various scenarios motivated by real life, such as medical data analysis, autonomous driving, and adversarial training, we are interested in robust deep networks. A network is robust when a relatively small perturbation of the input cannot lead to drastic changes in output (like change of class, etc.). This falls under the broader scope field of Neural Network Certification (NNC). Two crucial problems in NNC are of profound interest to the scientific community: how to calculate the robustness of a given pre-trained network and how to construct robust networks. The common approach to constructing robust networks is Interval Bound Propagation (IBP). This paper demonstrates that IBP is sub-optimal in the first case due to its susceptibility to the wrapping effect. Even for linear activation, IBP gives strongly sub-optimal bounds. Consequently, one should use strategies immune to the wrapping effect to obtain bounds close to optimal ones. We adapt two classical approaches dedicated to strict computations -- Dubleton Arithmetic and Affine Arithmetic -- to mitigate the wrapping effect in neural networks. These techniques yield precise results for networks with linear activation functions, thus resisting the wrapping effect. As a result, we achieve bounds significantly closer to the optimal level than IBPs.
An Enhanced Harmonic Densely Connected Hybrid Transformer Network Architecture for Chronic Wound Segmentation Utilising Multi-Colour Space Tensor Merging
Authors: Bill Cassidy, Christian Mcbride, Connah Kendrick, Neil D. Reeves, Joseph M. Pappachan, Cornelius J. Fernandez, Elias Chacko, Raphael Brüngel, Christoph M. Friedrich, Metib Alotaibi, Abdullah Abdulaziz AlWabel, Mohammad Alderwish, Kuan-Ying Lai, Moi Hoon Yap
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00

Chronic wounds and associated complications present ever growing burdens for clinics and hospitals world wide. Venous, arterial, diabetic, and pressure wounds are becoming increasingly common globally. These conditions can result in highly debilitating repercussions for those affected, with limb amputations and increased mortality risk resulting from infection becoming more common. New methods to assist clinicians in chronic wound care are therefore vital to maintain high quality care standards. This paper presents an improved HarDNet segmentation architecture which integrates a contrast-eliminating component in the initial layers of the network to enhance feature learning. We also utilise a multi-colour space tensor merging process and adjust the harmonic shape of the convolution blocks to facilitate these additional features. We train our proposed model using wound images from light-skinned patients and test the model on two test sets (one set with ground truth, and one without) comprising only darker-skinned cases. Subjective ratings are obtained from clinical wound experts with intraclass correlation coefficient used to determine inter-rater reliability. For the dark-skin tone test set with ground truth, we demonstrate improvements in terms of Dice similarity coefficient (+0.1221) and intersection over union (+0.1274). Qualitative analysis showed high expert ratings, with improvements of >3% demonstrated when comparing the baseline model with the proposed model. This paper presents the first study to focus on darker-skin tones for chronic wound segmentation using models trained only on wound images exhibiting lighter skin. Diabetes is highly prevalent in countries where patients have darker skin tones, highlighting the need for a greater focus on such cases. Additionally, we conduct the largest qualitative study to date for chronic wound segmentation.
LANTERN: Accelerating Visual Autoregressive Models with Relaxed Speculative Decoding
Authors: Doohyuk Jang, Sihwan Park, June Yong Yang, Yeonsung Jung, Jihun Yun, Souvik Kundu, Sung-Yub Kim, Eunho Yang
Date: 2024-10-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation

Auto-Regressive (AR) models have recently gained prominence in image generation, often matching or even surpassing the performance of diffusion models. However, one major limitation of AR models is their sequential nature, which processes tokens one at a time, slowing down generation compared to models like GANs or diffusion-based methods that operate more efficiently. While speculative decoding has proven effective for accelerating LLMs by generating multiple tokens in a single forward, its application in visual AR models remains largely unexplored. In this work, we identify a challenge in this setting, which we term \textit{token selection ambiguity}, wherein visual AR models frequently assign uniformly low probabilities to tokens, hampering the performance of speculative decoding. To overcome this challenge, we propose a relaxed acceptance condition referred to as LANTERN that leverages the interchangeability of tokens in latent space. This relaxation restores the effectiveness of speculative decoding in visual AR models by enabling more flexible use of candidate tokens that would otherwise be prematurely rejected. Furthermore, by incorporating a total variation distance bound, we ensure that these speed gains are achieved without significantly compromising image quality or semantic coherence. Experimental results demonstrate the efficacy of our method in providing a substantial speed-up over speculative decoding. In specific, compared to a na\"ive application of the state-of-the-art speculative decoding, LANTERN increases speed-ups by $\mathbf{1.75}\times$ and $\mathbf{1.82}\times$, as compared to greedy decoding and random sampling, respectively, when applied to LlamaGen, a contemporary visual AR model.