pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Conditional Distribution Learning on Graphs
Authors: Jie Chen, Hua Mao, Yuanbiao Gou, Zhu Wang, Xi Peng
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Data Augmentation, Graph Classification, Graph Neural Network, Graph Representation Learning, Representation Learning

Leveraging the diversity and quantity of data provided by various graph-structured data augmentations while preserving intrinsic semantic information is challenging. Additionally, successive layers in graph neural network (GNN) tend to produce more similar node embeddings, while graph contrastive learning aims to increase the dissimilarity between negative pairs of node embeddings. This inevitably results in a conflict between the message-passing mechanism (MPM) of GNNs and the contrastive learning (CL) of negative pairs via intraviews. In this paper, we propose a conditional distribution learning (CDL) method that learns graph representations from graph-structured data for semisupervised graph classification. Specifically, we present an end-to-end graph representation learning model to align the conditional distributions of weakly and strongly augmented features over the original features. This alignment enables the CDL model to effectively preserve intrinsic semantic information when both weak and strong augmentations are applied to graph-structured data. To avoid the conflict between the MPM and the CL of negative pairs, positive pairs of node representations are retained for measuring the similarity between the original features and the corresponding weakly augmented features. Extensive experiments with several benchmark graph datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed CDL method.
Dist Loss: Enhancing Regression in Few-Shot Region through Distribution Distance Constraint
Authors: Guangkun Nie, Gongzheng Tang, Shenda Hong
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, imbalanced classification

Imbalanced data distributions are prevalent in real-world scenarios, posing significant challenges in both imbalanced classification and imbalanced regression tasks. They often cause deep learning models to overfit in areas of high sample density (many-shot regions) while underperforming in areas of low sample density (few-shot regions). This characteristic restricts the utility of deep learning models in various sectors, notably healthcare, where areas with few-shot data hold greater clinical relevance. While recent studies have shown the benefits of incorporating distribution information in imbalanced classification tasks, such strategies are rarely explored in imbalanced regression. In this paper, we address this issue by introducing a novel loss function, termed Dist Loss, designed to minimize the distribution distance between the model's predictions and the target labels in a differentiable manner, effectively integrating distribution information into model training. Dist Loss enables deep learning models to regularize their output distribution during training, effectively enhancing their focus on few-shot regions. We have conducted extensive experiments across three datasets spanning computer vision and healthcare: IMDB-WIKI-DIR, AgeDB-DIR, and ECG-Ka-DIR. The results demonstrate that Dist Loss effectively mitigates the negative impact of imbalanced data distribution on model performance, achieving state-of-the-art results in sparse data regions. Furthermore, Dist Loss is easy to integrate, complementing existing methods.
LPLgrad: Optimizing Active Learning Through Gradient Norm Sample Selection and Auxiliary Model Training
Authors: Shreen Gul, Mohamed Elmahallawy, Sanjay Madria, Ardhendu Tripathy
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Active Learning, image-classification, Image Classification

Machine learning models are increasingly being utilized across various fields and tasks due to their outstanding performance and strong generalization capabilities. Nonetheless, their success hinges on the availability of large volumes of annotated data, the creation of which is often labor-intensive, time-consuming, and expensive. Many active learning (AL) approaches have been proposed to address these challenges, but they often fail to fully leverage the information from the core phases of AL, such as training on the labeled set and querying new unlabeled samples. To bridge this gap, we propose a novel AL approach, Loss Prediction Loss with Gradient Norm (LPLgrad), designed to quantify model uncertainty effectively and improve the accuracy of image classification tasks. LPLgrad operates in two distinct phases: (i) {\em Training Phase} aims to predict the loss for input features by jointly training a main model and an auxiliary model. Both models are trained on the labeled data to maximize the efficiency of the learning process, an aspect often overlooked in previous AL methods. This dual-model approach enhances the ability to extract complex input features and learn intrinsic patterns from the data effectively; (ii) {\em Querying Phase} that quantifies the uncertainty of the main model to guide sample selection. This is achieved by calculating the gradient norm of the entropy values for samples in the unlabeled dataset. Samples with the highest gradient norms are prioritized for labeling and subsequently added to the labeled set, improving the model's performance with minimal labeling effort. Extensive evaluations on real-world datasets demonstrate that the LPLgrad approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods by order of magnitude in terms of accuracy on a small number of labeled images, yet achieving comparable training and querying times in multiple image classification tasks.
An accuracy improving method for advertising click through rate prediction based on enhanced xDeepFM model
Authors: Xiaowei Xi, Song Leng, Yuqing Gong, Dalin Li
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Click-Through Rate Prediction, Prediction

Advertising click-through rate (CTR) prediction aims to forecast the probability that a user will click on an advertisement in a given context, thus providing enterprises with decision support for product ranking and ad placement. However, CTR prediction faces challenges such as data sparsity and class imbalance, which adversely affect model training effectiveness. Moreover, most current CTR prediction models fail to fully explore the associations among user history, interests, and target advertisements from multiple perspectives, neglecting important information at different levels. To address these issues, this paper proposes an improved CTR prediction model based on the xDeepFM architecture. By integrating a multi-head attention mechanism, the model can simultaneously focus on different aspects of feature interactions, enhancing its ability to learn intricate patterns without significantly increasing computational complexity. Furthermore, replacing the linear model with a Factorization Machine (FM) model improves the handling of high-dimensional sparse data by flexibly capturing both first-order and second-order feature interactions. Experimental results on the Criteo dataset demonstrate that the proposed model outperforms other state-of-the-art methods, showing significant improvements in both AUC and Logloss metrics. This enhancement facilitates better mining of implicit relationships between features and improves the accuracy of advertising CTR prediction.
Parameter Efficient Mamba Tuning via Projector-targeted Diagonal-centric Linear Transformation
Authors: Seokil Ham, Hee-Seon Kim, Sangmin Woo, Changick Kim
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Mamba, parameter-efficient fine-tuning, State Space Models, Transfer Learning

Despite the growing interest in Mamba architecture as a potential replacement for Transformer architecture, parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) approaches for Mamba remain largely unexplored. In our study, we introduce two key insights-driven strategies for PEFT in Mamba architecture: (1) While state-space models (SSMs) have been regarded as the cornerstone of Mamba architecture, then expected to play a primary role in transfer learning, our findings reveal that Projectors -- not SSMs -- are the predominant contributors to transfer learning, and (2) Based on our observation that adapting pretrained Projectors to new tasks can be effectively approximated through a near-diagonal linear transformation, we propose a novel PEFT method specialized to Mamba architecture: Projector-targeted Diagonal-centric Linear Transformation (ProDiaL). ProDiaL focuses on optimizing only diagonal-centric linear transformation matrices, without directly fine-tuning the pretrained Projector weights. This targeted approach allows efficient task adaptation, utilizing less than 1% of the total parameters, and exhibits strong performance across both vision and language Mamba models, highlighting its versatility and effectiveness.
Opportunities of Reinforcement Learning in South Africa's Just Transition
Authors: Claude Formanek, Callum Rhys Tilbury, Jonathan P. Shock
Date: 2024-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

South Africa stands at a crucial juncture, grappling with interwoven socio-economic challenges such as poverty, inequality, unemployment, and the looming climate crisis. The government's Just Transition framework aims to enhance climate resilience, achieve net-zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and promote social inclusion and poverty eradication. According to the Presidential Commission on the Fourth Industrial Revolution, artificial intelligence technologies offer significant promise in addressing these challenges. This paper explores the overlooked potential of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in supporting South Africa's Just Transition. It examines how RL can enhance agriculture and land-use practices, manage complex, decentralised energy networks, and optimise transportation and logistics, thereby playing a critical role in achieving a just and equitable transition to a low-carbon future for all South Africans. We provide a roadmap as to how other researchers in the field may be able to contribute to these pressing problems.
Adaptively Controllable Diffusion Model for Efficient Conditional Image Generation
Authors: Yucheng Xing, Xiaodong Liu, Xin Wang
Date: 2024-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Conditional Image Generation, Image Generation

With the development of artificial intelligence, more and more attention has been put onto generative models, which represent the creativity, a very important aspect of intelligence. In recent years, diffusion models have been studied and proven to be more reasonable and effective than previous methods. However, common diffusion frameworks suffer from controllability problems. Although extra conditions have been considered by some work to guide the diffusion process for a specific target generation, it only controls the generation result but not its process. In this work, we propose a new adaptive framework, $\textit{Adaptively Controllable Diffusion (AC-Diff) Model}$, to automatically and fully control the generation process, including not only the type of generation result but also the length and parameters of the generation process. Both inputs and conditions will be first fed into a $\textit{Conditional Time-Step (CTS) Module}$ to determine the number of steps needed for a generation. Then according to the length of the process, the diffusion rate parameters will be estimated through our $\textit{Adaptive Hybrid Noise Schedule (AHNS) Module}$. We further train the network with the corresponding adaptive sampling mechanism to learn how to adjust itself according to the conditions for the overall performance improvement. To enable its practical applications, AC-Diff is expected to largely reduce the average number of generation steps and execution time while maintaining the same performance as done in the literature diffusion models.
Text Embedding is Not All You Need: Attention Control for Text-to-Image Semantic Alignment with Text Self-Attention Maps
Authors: Jeeyung Kim, Erfan Esmaeili, Qiang Qiu
Date: 2024-11-21 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: All, Attribute, Image Generation

In text-to-image diffusion models, the cross-attention map of each text token indicates the specific image regions attended. Comparing these maps of syntactically related tokens provides insights into how well the generated image reflects the text prompt. For example, in the prompt, "a black car and a white clock", the cross-attention maps for "black" and "car" should focus on overlapping regions to depict a black car, while "car" and "clock" should not. Incorrect overlapping in the maps generally produces generation flaws such as missing objects and incorrect attribute binding. Our study makes the key observations investigating this issue in the existing text-to-image models:(1) the similarity in text embeddings between different tokens -- used as conditioning inputs -- can cause their cross-attention maps to focus on the same image regions; and (2) text embeddings often fail to faithfully capture syntactic relations already within text attention maps. As a result, such syntactic relationships can be overlooked in cross-attention module, leading to inaccurate image generation. To address this, we propose a method that directly transfers syntactic relations from the text attention maps to the cross-attention module via a test-time optimization. Our approach leverages this inherent yet unexploited information within text attention maps to enhance image-text semantic alignment across diverse prompts, without relying on external guidance.
TIMBRE: Efficient Job Recommendation On Heterogeneous Graphs For Professional Recruiters
Authors: Eric Behar, Julien Romero, Amel Bouzeghoub, Katarzyna Wegrzyn-Wolska
Date: 2024-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Graph Neural Network, Recommendation Systems

Job recommendation gathers many challenges well-known in recommender systems. First, it suffers from the cold start problem, with the user (the candidate) and the item (the job) having a very limited lifespan. It makes the learning of good user and item representations hard. Second, the temporal aspect is crucial: We cannot recommend an item in the future or too much in the past. Therefore, using solely collaborative filtering barely works. Finally, it is essential to integrate information about the users and the items, as we cannot rely only on previous interactions. This paper proposes a temporal graph-based method for job recommendation: TIMBRE (Temporal Integrated Model for Better REcommendations). TIMBRE integrates user and item information into a heterogeneous graph. This graph is adapted to allow efficient temporal recommendation and evaluation, which is later done using a graph neural network. Finally, we evaluate our approach with recommender system metrics, rarely computed on graph-based recommender systems.
Delegating Responsibilities to Intelligent Autonomous Systems: Challenges and Benefits
Authors: Gordana Dodig-Crnkovic, Gianfranco Basti, Tobias Holstein
Date: 2024-11-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Ethics

As AI systems increasingly operate with autonomy and adaptability, the traditional boundaries of moral responsibility in techno-social systems are being challenged. This paper explores the evolving discourse on the delegation of responsibilities to intelligent autonomous agents and the ethical implications of such practices. Synthesizing recent developments in AI ethics, including concepts of distributed responsibility and ethical AI by design, the paper proposes a functionalist perspective as a framework. This perspective views moral responsibility not as an individual trait but as a role within a socio-technical system, distributed among human and artificial agents. As an example of 'AI ethical by design,' we present Basti and Vitiello's implementation. They suggest that AI can act as artificial moral agents by learning ethical guidelines and using Deontic Higher-Order Logic to assess decisions ethically. Motivated by the possible speed and scale beyond human supervision and ethical implications, the paper argues for 'AI ethical by design', while acknowledging the distributed, shared, and dynamic nature of responsibility. This functionalist approach offers a practical framework for navigating the complexities of AI ethics in a rapidly evolving technological landscape.
The Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment (FRIA) in the AI Act: Roots, legal obligations and key elements for a model template
Authors: Alessandro Mantelero
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00

What is the context which gave rise to the obligation to carry out a Fundamental Rights Impact Assessment (FRIA) in the AI Act? How has assessment of the impact on fundamental rights been framed by the EU legislator in the AI Act? What methodological criteria should be followed in developing the FRIA? These are the three main research questions that this article aims to address, through both legal analysis of the relevant provisions of the AI Act and discussion of various possible models for assessment of the impact of AI on fundamental rights. The overall objective of this article is to fill existing gaps in the theoretical and methodological elaboration of the FRIA, as outlined in the AI Act. In order to facilitate the future work of EU and national bodies and AI operators in placing this key tool for human-centric and trustworthy AI at the heart of the EU approach to AI design and development, this article outlines the main building blocks of a model template for the FRIA. While this proposal is consistent with the rationale and scope of the AI Act, it is also applicable beyond the cases listed in Article 27 and can serve as a blueprint for other national and international regulatory initiatives to ensure that AI is fully consistent with human rights.
Can Open-source LLMs Enhance Data Synthesis for Toxic Detection?: An Experimental Study
Authors: Zheng Hui, Zhaoxiao Guo, Hang Zhao, Juanyong Duan, Lin Ai, Yinheng Li, Julia Hirschberg, Congrui Huang
Date: 2024-11-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Hallucination, Prompt Engineering

Effective toxic content detection relies heavily on high-quality and diverse data, which serves as the foundation for robust content moderation models. This study explores the potential of open-source LLMs for harmful data synthesis, utilizing prompt engineering and fine-tuning techniques to enhance data quality and diversity. In a two-stage evaluation, we first examine the capabilities of six open-source LLMs in generating harmful data across multiple datasets using prompt engineering. In the second stage, we fine-tune these models to improve data generation while addressing challenges such as hallucination, data duplication, and overfitting. Our findings reveal that Mistral excels in generating high-quality and diverse harmful data with minimal hallucination. Furthermore, fine-tuning enhances data quality, offering scalable and cost-effective solutions for augmenting datasets for specific toxic content detection tasks. These results emphasize the significance of data synthesis in building robust, standalone detection models and highlight the potential of open-source LLMs to advance smaller downstream content moderation systems. We implemented this approach in real-world industrial settings, demonstrating the feasibility and efficiency of fine-tuned open-source LLMs for harmful data synthesis.
Gradient-Weighted Feature Back-Projection: A Fast Alternative to Feature Distillation in 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Joji Joseph, Bharadwaj Amrutur, Shalabh Bhatnagar
Date: 2024-11-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Segmentation

We introduce a training-free method for feature field rendering in Gaussian splatting. Our approach back-projects 2D features into pre-trained 3D Gaussians, using a weighted sum based on each Gaussian's influence in the final rendering. While most training-based feature field rendering methods excel at 2D segmentation but perform poorly at 3D segmentation without post-processing, our method achieves high-quality results in both 2D and 3D segmentation. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach is fast, scalable, and offers performance comparable to training-based methods.
Beyond Visual Understanding: Introducing PARROT-360V for Vision Language Model Benchmarking
Authors: Harsha Vardhan Khurdula, Basem Rizk, Indus Khaitan, Janit Anjaria, Aviral Srivastava, Rajvardhan Khaitan
Date: 2024-11-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Visual Reasoning

Current benchmarks for evaluating Vision Language Models (VLMs) often fall short in thoroughly assessing model abilities to understand and process complex visual and textual content. They typically focus on simple tasks that do not require deep reasoning or the integration of multiple data modalities to solve an original problem. To address this gap, we introduce the PARROT-360V Benchmark, a novel and comprehensive benchmark featuring 2487 challenging visual puzzles designed to test VLMs on complex visual reasoning tasks. We evaluated leading models: GPT-4o, Claude-3.5-Sonnet, and Gemini-1.5-Pro, using PARROT-360V to assess their capabilities in combining visual clues with language skills to solve tasks in a manner akin to human problem-solving. Our findings reveal a notable performance gap: state-of-the-art models scored between 28 to 56 percentage on our benchmark, significantly lower than their performance on popular benchmarks. This underscores the limitations of current VLMs in handling complex, multi-step reasoning tasks and highlights the need for more robust evaluation frameworks to advance the field.
On the Impact of Fine-Tuning on Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Authors: Elita Lobo, Chirag Agarwal, Himabindu Lakkaraju
Date: 2024-11-22 00:00:00

Large language models have emerged as powerful tools for general intelligence, showcasing advanced natural language processing capabilities that find applications across diverse domains. Despite their impressive performance, recent studies have highlighted the potential for significant enhancements in LLMs' task-specific performance through fine-tuning strategies like Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), supervised fine-tuning (SFT), and Quantized Low-Rank Adapters (Q-LoRA) method. However, previous works have shown that while fine-tuning offers significant performance gains, it also leads to challenges such as catastrophic forgetting and privacy and safety risks. To this end, there has been little to no work in \textit{understanding the impact of fine-tuning on the reasoning capabilities of LLMs}. Our research investigates the effect of fine-tuning on the reasoning abilities of LLMs, addressing critical questions regarding the impact of task-specific fine-tuning on overall reasoning capabilities, the influence of fine-tuning on Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning performance, and the implications for the faithfulness of CoT reasonings. By exploring these dimensions, our study shows the impact of fine-tuning on LLM reasoning capabilities, where the faithfulness of CoT reasoning, on average across four datasets, decreases, highlighting potential shifts in internal mechanisms of the LLMs resulting from fine-tuning processes.