pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
EXPLAIN, AGREE, LEARN: Scaling Learning for Neural Probabilistic Logic
Authors: Victor Verreet, Lennert De Smet, Luc De Raedt, Emanuele Sansone
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Neural probabilistic logic systems follow the neuro-symbolic (NeSy) paradigm by combining the perceptive and learning capabilities of neural networks with the robustness of probabilistic logic. Learning corresponds to likelihood optimization of the neural networks. However, to obtain the likelihood exactly, expensive probabilistic logic inference is required. To scale learning to more complex systems, we therefore propose to instead optimize a sampling based objective. We prove that the objective has a bounded error with respect to the likelihood, which vanishes when increasing the sample count. Furthermore, the error vanishes faster by exploiting a new concept of sample diversity. We then develop the EXPLAIN, AGREE, LEARN (EXAL) method that uses this objective. EXPLAIN samples explanations for the data. AGREE reweighs each explanation in concordance with the neural component. LEARN uses the reweighed explanations as a signal for learning. In contrast to previous NeSy methods, EXAL can scale to larger problem sizes while retaining theoretical guarantees on the error. Experimentally, our theoretical claims are verified and EXAL outperforms recent NeSy methods when scaling up the MNIST addition and Warcraft pathfinding problems.
Multimodal Causal Reasoning Benchmark: Challenging Vision Large Language Models to Infer Causal Links Between Siamese Images
Authors: Zhiyuan Li, Heng Wang, Dongnan Liu, Chaoyi Zhang, Ao Ma, Jieting Long, Weidong Cai
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Sentence

Large Language Models (LLMs) have showcased exceptional ability in causal reasoning from textual information. However, will these causalities remain straightforward for Vision Large Language Models (VLLMs) when only visual hints are provided? Motivated by this, we propose a novel Multimodal Causal Reasoning benchmark, namely MuCR, to challenge VLLMs to infer semantic cause-and-effect relationship when solely relying on visual cues such as action, appearance, clothing, and environment. Specifically, we introduce a prompt-driven image synthesis approach to create siamese images with embedded semantic causality and visual cues, which can effectively evaluate VLLMs' causal reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we develop tailored metrics from multiple perspectives, including image-level match, phrase-level understanding, and sentence-level explanation, to comprehensively assess VLLMs' comprehension abilities. Our extensive experiments reveal that the current state-of-the-art VLLMs are not as skilled at multimodal causal reasoning as we might have hoped. Furthermore, we perform a comprehensive analysis to understand these models' shortcomings from different views and suggest directions for future research. We hope MuCR can serve as a valuable resource and foundational benchmark in multimodal causal reasoning research. The project is available at: https://github.com/Zhiyuan-Li-John/MuCR
SC3D: Label-Efficient Outdoor 3D Object Detection via Single Click Annotation
Authors: Qiming Xia, Hongwei Lin, Wei Ye, Hai Wu, Yadan Luo, Cheng Wang, Chenglu Wen
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Detection, object-detection, Object Detection, Pseudo Label, Weakly Supervised 3D Detection

LiDAR-based outdoor 3D object detection has received widespread attention. However, training 3D detectors from the LiDAR point cloud typically relies on expensive bounding box annotations. This paper presents SC3D, an innovative label-efficient method requiring only a single coarse click on the bird's eye view of the 3D point cloud for each frame. A key challenge here is the absence of complete geometric descriptions of the target objects from such simple click annotations. To address this issue, our proposed SC3D adopts a progressive pipeline. Initially, we design a mixed pseudo-label generation module that expands limited click annotations into a mixture of bounding box and semantic mask supervision. Next, we propose a mix-supervised teacher model, enabling the detector to learn mixed supervision information. Finally, we introduce a mixed-supervised student network that leverages the teacher model's generalization ability to learn unclicked instances.Experimental results on the widely used nuScenes and KITTI datasets demonstrate that our SC3D with only coarse clicks, which requires only 0.2% annotation cost, achieves state-of-the-art performance compared to weakly-supervised 3D detection methods.The code will be made publicly available.
AgentCourt: Simulating Court with Adversarial Evolvable Lawyer Agents
Authors: Guhong Chen, Liyang Fan, Zihan Gong, Nan Xie, Zixuan Li, Ziqiang Liu, Chengming Li, Qiang Qu, Shiwen Ni, Min Yang
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00

In this paper, we present a simulation system called AgentCourt that simulates the entire courtroom process. The judge, plaintiff's lawyer, defense lawyer, and other participants are autonomous agents driven by large language models (LLMs). Our core goal is to enable lawyer agents to learn how to argue a case, as well as improving their overall legal skills, through courtroom process simulation. To achieve this goal, we propose an adversarial evolutionary approach for the lawyer-agent. Since AgentCourt can simulate the occurrence and development of court hearings based on a knowledge base and LLM, the lawyer agents can continuously learn and accumulate experience from real court cases. The simulation experiments show that after two lawyer-agents have engaged in a thousand adversarial legal cases in AgentCourt (which can take a decade for real-world lawyers), compared to their pre-evolutionary state, the evolved lawyer agents exhibit consistent improvement in their ability to handle legal tasks. To enhance the credibility of our experimental results, we enlisted a panel of professional lawyers to evaluate our simulations. The evaluation indicates that the evolved lawyer agents exhibit notable advancements in responsiveness, as well as expertise and logical rigor. This work paves the way for advancing LLM-driven agent technology in legal scenarios. Code is available at https://github.com/relic-yuexi/AgentCourt.
An Efficient Replay for Class-Incremental Learning with Pre-trained Models
Authors: Weimin Yin, Bin Chen adn Chunzhao Xie, Zhenhao Tan
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: class-incremental learning, Class Incremental Learning, Incremental Learning

In general class-incremental learning, researchers typically use sample sets as a tool to avoid catastrophic forgetting during continuous learning. At the same time, researchers have also noted the differences between class-incremental learning and Oracle training and have attempted to make corrections. In recent years, researchers have begun to develop class-incremental learning algorithms utilizing pre-trained models, achieving significant results. This paper observes that in class-incremental learning, the steady state among the weight guided by each class center is disrupted, which is significantly correlated with catastrophic forgetting. Based on this, we propose a new method to overcoming forgetting . In some cases, by retaining only a single sample unit of each class in memory for replay and applying simple gradient constraints, very good results can be achieved. Experimental results indicate that under the condition of pre-trained models, our method can achieve competitive performance with very low computational cost and by simply using the cross-entropy loss.
Confidence-weighted integration of human and machine judgments for superior decision-making
Authors: Felipe Yáñez, Xiaoliang Luo, Omar Valerio Minero, Bradley C. Love
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diversity

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as powerful tools in various domains. Recent studies have shown that LLMs can surpass humans in certain tasks, such as predicting the outcomes of neuroscience studies. What role does this leave for humans in the overall decision process? One possibility is that humans, despite performing worse than LLMs, can still add value when teamed with them. A human and machine team can surpass each individual teammate when team members' confidence is well-calibrated and team members diverge in which tasks they find difficult (i.e., calibration and diversity are needed). We simplified and extended a Bayesian approach to combining judgments using a logistic regression framework that integrates confidence-weighted judgments for any number of team members. Using this straightforward method, we demonstrated in a neuroscience forecasting task that, even when humans were inferior to LLMs, their combination with one or more LLMs consistently improved team performance. Our hope is that this simple and effective strategy for integrating the judgments of humans and machines will lead to productive collaborations.
Treat Stillness with Movement: Remote Sensing Change Detection via Coarse-grained Temporal Foregrounds Mining
Authors: Xixi Wang, Zitian Wang, Jingtao Jiang, Lan Chen, Xiao Wang, Bo Jiang
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection

Current works focus on addressing the remote sensing change detection task using bi-temporal images. Although good performance can be achieved, however, seldom of they consider the motion cues which may also be vital. In this work, we revisit the widely adopted bi-temporal images-based framework and propose a novel Coarse-grained Temporal Mining Augmented (CTMA) framework. To be specific, given the bi-temporal images, we first transform them into a video using interpolation operations. Then, a set of temporal encoders is adopted to extract the motion features from the obtained video for coarse-grained changed region prediction. Subsequently, we design a novel Coarse-grained Foregrounds Augmented Spatial Encoder module to integrate both global and local information. We also introduce a motion augmented strategy that leverages motion cues as an additional output to aggregate with the spatial features for improved results. Meanwhile, we feed the input image pairs into the ResNet to get the different features and also the spatial blocks for fine-grained feature learning. More importantly, we propose a mask augmented strategy that utilizes coarse-grained changed regions, incorporating them into the decoder blocks to enhance the final changed prediction. Extensive experiments conducted on multiple benchmark datasets fully validated the effectiveness of our proposed framework for remote sensing image change detection. The source code of this paper will be released on https://github.com/Event-AHU/CTM_Remote_Sensing_Change_Detection
A Survey on Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation
Authors: Dingzhu Wen, Yong Zhou, Xiaoyang Li, Yuanming Shi, Kaibin Huang, Khaled B. Letaief
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Integrated sensing and communication, ISAC, Survey

The forthcoming generation of wireless technology, 6G, aims to usher in an era of ubiquitous intelligent services, where everything is interconnected and intelligent. This vision requires the seamless integration of three fundamental modules: Sensing for information acquisition, communication for information sharing, and computation for information processing and decision-making. These modules are intricately linked, especially in complex tasks such as edge learning and inference. However, the performance of these modules is interdependent, creating a resource competition for time, energy, and bandwidth. Existing techniques like integrated communication and computation (ICC), integrated sensing and computation (ISC), and integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) have made partial strides in addressing this challenge, but they fall short of meeting the extreme performance requirements. To overcome these limitations, it is essential to develop new techniques that comprehensively integrate sensing, communication, and computation. This integrated approach, known as Integrated Sensing, Communication, and Computation (ISCC), offers a systematic perspective for enhancing task performance. This paper begins with a comprehensive survey of historic and related techniques such as ICC, ISC, and ISAC, highlighting their strengths and limitations. It then discusses the benefits, functions, and challenges of ISCC. Subsequently, the state-of-the-art signal designs for ISCC, along with network resource management strategies specifically tailored for ISCC are explored. Furthermore, this paper discusses the exciting research opportunities that lie ahead for implementing ISCC in future advanced networks, and the unresolved issues requiring further investigation. ISCC is expected to unlock the full potential of intelligent connectivity, paving the way for groundbreaking applications and services.
RAGChecker: A Fine-grained Framework for Diagnosing Retrieval-Augmented Generation
Authors: Dongyu Ru, Lin Qiu, Xiangkun Hu, Tianhang Zhang, Peng Shi, Shuaichen Chang, Cheng Jiayang, Cunxiang Wang, Shichao Sun, Huanyu Li, Zizhao Zhang, Binjie Wang, Jiarong Jiang, Tong He, Zhiguo Wang, PengFei Liu, Yue Zhang, Zheng Zhang
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Despite Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) showing promising capability in leveraging external knowledge, a comprehensive evaluation of RAG systems is still challenging due to the modular nature of RAG, evaluation of long-form responses and reliability of measurements. In this paper, we propose a fine-grained evaluation framework, RAGChecker, that incorporates a suite of diagnostic metrics for both the retrieval and generation modules. Meta evaluation verifies that RAGChecker has significantly better correlations with human judgments than other evaluation metrics. Using RAGChecker, we evaluate 8 RAG systems and conduct an in-depth analysis of their performance, revealing insightful patterns and trade-offs in the design choices of RAG architectures. The metrics of RAGChecker can guide researchers and practitioners in developing more effective RAG systems. This work has been open sourced at https://github.com/amazon-science/RAGChecker.
SPEED: Scalable Preprocessing of EEG Data for Self-Supervised Learning
Authors: Anders Gjølbye, Lina Skerath, William Lehn-Schiøler, Nicolas Langer, Lars Kai Hansen
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG, Self-Supervised Learning

Electroencephalography (EEG) research typically focuses on tasks with narrowly defined objectives, but recent studies are expanding into the use of unlabeled data within larger models, aiming for a broader range of applications. This addresses a critical challenge in EEG research. For example, Kostas et al. (2021) show that self-supervised learning (SSL) outperforms traditional supervised methods. Given the high noise levels in EEG data, we argue that further improvements are possible with additional preprocessing. Current preprocessing methods often fail to efficiently manage the large data volumes required for SSL, due to their lack of optimization, reliance on subjective manual corrections, and validation processes or inflexible protocols that limit SSL. We propose a Python-based EEG preprocessing pipeline optimized for self-supervised learning, designed to efficiently process large-scale data. This optimization not only stabilizes self-supervised training but also enhances performance on downstream tasks compared to training with raw data.
Maximally Permissive Reward Machines
Authors: Giovanni Varricchione, Natasha Alechina, Mehdi Dastani, Brian Logan
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00

Reward machines allow the definition of rewards for temporally extended tasks and behaviors. Specifying "informative" reward machines can be challenging. One way to address this is to generate reward machines from a high-level abstract description of the learning environment, using techniques such as AI planning. However, previous planning-based approaches generate a reward machine based on a single (sequential or partial-order) plan, and do not allow maximum flexibility to the learning agent. In this paper we propose a new approach to synthesising reward machines which is based on the set of partial order plans for a goal. We prove that learning using such "maximally permissive" reward machines results in higher rewards than learning using RMs based on a single plan. We present experimental results which support our theoretical claims by showing that our approach obtains higher rewards than the single-plan approach in practice.
Navigating Data Scarcity using Foundation Models: A Benchmark of Few-Shot and Zero-Shot Learning Approaches in Medical Imaging
Authors: Stefano Woerner, Christian F. Baumgartner
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Medical Image Analysis, Zero-Shot Learning

Data scarcity is a major limiting factor for applying modern machine learning techniques to clinical tasks. Although sufficient data exists for some well-studied medical tasks, there remains a long tail of clinically relevant tasks with poor data availability. Recently, numerous foundation models have demonstrated high suitability for few-shot learning (FSL) and zero-shot learning (ZSL), potentially making them more accessible to practitioners. However, it remains unclear which foundation model performs best on FSL medical image analysis tasks and what the optimal methods are for learning from limited data. We conducted a comprehensive benchmark study of ZSL and FSL using 16 pretrained foundation models on 19 diverse medical imaging datasets. Our results indicate that BiomedCLIP, a model pretrained exclusively on medical data, performs best on average for very small training set sizes, while very large CLIP models pretrained on LAION-2B perform best with slightly more training samples. However, simply fine-tuning a ResNet-18 pretrained on ImageNet performs similarly with more than five training examples per class. Our findings also highlight the need for further research on foundation models specifically tailored for medical applications and the collection of more datasets to train these models.
DeNOTS: Stable Deep Neural ODEs for Time Series
Authors: Ilya Kuleshov, Evgenia Romanenkova, Vladislav Zhuzhel, Galina Boeva, Evgeni Vorsin, Alexey Zaytsev
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Irregular Time Series, State Space Models, Time Series

Neural CDEs provide a natural way to process the temporal evolution of irregular time series. The number of function evaluations (NFE) is these systems' natural analog of depth (the number of layers in traditional neural networks). It is usually regulated via solver error tolerance: lower tolerance means higher numerical precision, requiring more integration steps. However, lowering tolerances does not adequately increase the models' expressiveness. We propose a simple yet effective alternative: scaling the integration time horizon to increase NFEs and "deepen`` the model. Increasing the integration interval causes uncontrollable growth in conventional vector fields, so we also propose a way to stabilize the dynamics via Negative Feedback (NF). It ensures provable stability without constraining flexibility. It also implies robustness: we provide theoretical bounds for Neural ODE risk using Gaussian process theory. Experiments on four open datasets demonstrate that our method, DeNOTS, outperforms existing approaches~ -- ~including recent Neural RDEs and state space models,~ -- ~achieving up to $20\%$ improvement in metrics. DeNOTS combines expressiveness, stability, and robustness, enabling reliable modelling in continuous-time domains.
Text2BIM: Generating Building Models Using a Large Language Model-based Multi-Agent Framework
Authors: Changyu Du, Sebastian Esser, Stavros Nousias, André Borrmann
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

The conventional BIM authoring process typically requires designers to master complex and tedious modeling commands in order to materialize their design intentions within BIM authoring tools. This additional cognitive burden complicates the design process and hinders the adoption of BIM and model-based design in the AEC (Architecture, Engineering, and Construction) industry. To facilitate the expression of design intentions more intuitively, we propose Text2BIM, an LLM-based multi-agent framework that can generate 3D building models from natural language instructions. This framework orchestrates multiple LLM agents to collaborate and reason, transforming textual user input into imperative code that invokes the BIM authoring tool's APIs, thereby generating editable BIM models with internal layouts, external envelopes, and semantic information directly in the software. Furthermore, a rule-based model checker is introduced into the agentic workflow, utilizing predefined domain knowledge to guide the LLM agents in resolving issues within the generated models and iteratively improving model quality. Extensive experiments were conducted to compare and analyze the performance of three different LLMs under the proposed framework. The evaluation results demonstrate that our approach can effectively generate high-quality, structurally rational building models that are aligned with the abstract concepts specified by user input. Finally, an interactive software prototype was developed to integrate the framework into the BIM authoring software Vectorworks, showcasing the potential of modeling by chatting.
The Clever Hans Effect in Unsupervised Learning
Authors: Jacob Kauffmann, Jonas Dippel, Lukas Ruff, Wojciech Samek, Klaus-Robert Müller, Grégoire Montavon
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00

Unsupervised learning has become an essential building block of AI systems. The representations it produces, e.g. in foundation models, are critical to a wide variety of downstream applications. It is therefore important to carefully examine unsupervised models to ensure not only that they produce accurate predictions, but also that these predictions are not "right for the wrong reasons", the so-called Clever Hans (CH) effect. Using specially developed Explainable AI techniques, we show for the first time that CH effects are widespread in unsupervised learning. Our empirical findings are enriched by theoretical insights, which interestingly point to inductive biases in the unsupervised learning machine as a primary source of CH effects. Overall, our work sheds light on unexplored risks associated with practical applications of unsupervised learning and suggests ways to make unsupervised learning more robust.
Adaptive User Journeys in Pharma E-Commerce with Reinforcement Learning: Insights from SwipeRx
Authors: Ana Fernández del Río, Michael Brennan Leong, Paulo Saraiva, Ivan Nazarov, Aditya Rastogi, Moiz Hassan, Dexian Tang, África Periáñez
Date: 2024-08-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Management, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

This paper introduces a reinforcement learning (RL) platform that enhances end-to-end user journeys in healthcare digital tools through personalization. We explore a case study with SwipeRx, the most popular all-in-one app for pharmacists in Southeast Asia, demonstrating how the platform can be used to personalize and adapt user experiences. Our RL framework is tested through a series of experiments with product recommendations tailored to each pharmacy based on real-time information on their purchasing history and in-app engagement, showing a significant increase in basket size. By integrating adaptive interventions into existing mobile health solutions and enriching user journeys, our platform offers a scalable solution to improve pharmaceutical supply chain management, health worker capacity building, and clinical decision and patient care, ultimately contributing to better healthcare outcomes.