pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Self-Replicating and Self-Employed Smart Contract on Ethereum Blockchain
Authors: Atsushi Masumori, Norihiro Maruyama, Takashi Ikegami
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00

Blockchain is the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. Blockchain is a robust distributed ledger that uses consensus algorithms to approve transactions in a decentralized manner, making malicious tampering extremely difficult. Ethereum, one of the blockchains, can be seen as an unstoppable computer which shared by users around the world that can run Turing-complete programs. In order to run any program on Ethereum, Ether (currency on Ethereum) is required. In other words, Ether can be seen as a kind of energy in the Ethereum world. We developed self-replicating and self-employed agents who earn the energy by themselves to replicate them, on the Ethereum blockchain. The agents can issued their token and gain Ether each time the tokens are sold. When a certain amount of Ether is accumulated, the agent replicates itself and leaves offspring. The goal of this project is to implement artificial agents that lives for itself, not as a tool for humans, in the open cyber space connected to the real world.
Direct Training High-Performance Deep Spiking Neural Networks: A Review of Theories and Methods
Authors: Chenlin Zhou, Han Zhang, Liutao Yu, Yumin Ye, Zhaokun Zhou, Liwei Huang, Zhengyu Ma, Xiaopeng Fan, Huihui Zhou, Yonghong Tian
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00

Spiking neural networks (SNNs) offer a promising energy-efficient alternative to artificial neural networks (ANNs), in virtue of their high biological plausibility, rich spatial-temporal dynamics, and event-driven computation. The direct training algorithms based on the surrogate gradient method provide sufficient flexibility to design novel SNN architectures and explore the spatial-temporal dynamics of SNNs. According to previous studies, the performance of models is highly dependent on their sizes. Recently, direct training deep SNNs have achieved great progress on both neuromorphic datasets and large-scale static datasets. Notably, transformer-based SNNs show comparable performance with their ANN counterparts. In this paper, we provide a new perspective to summarize the theories and methods for training deep SNNs with high performance in a systematic and comprehensive way, including theory fundamentals, spiking neuron models, advanced SNN models and residual architectures, software frameworks and neuromorphic hardware, applications, and future trends. The reviewed papers are collected at https://github.com/zhouchenlin2096/Awesome-Spiking-Neural-Networks
QxEAI: Quantum-like evolutionary algorithm for automated probabilistic forecasting
Authors: Kevin Xin, Lizhi Xin
Date: 2024-05-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Time Series

Forecasting, to estimate future events, is crucial for business and decision-making. This paper proposes QxEAI, a methodology that produces a probabilistic forecast that utilizes a quantum-like evolutionary algorithm based on training a quantum-like logic decision tree and a classical value tree on a small number of related time series. We demonstrate how the application of our quantum-like evolutionary algorithm to forecasting can overcome the challenges faced by classical and other machine learning approaches. By using three real-world datasets (Dow Jones Index, retail sales, gas consumption), we show how our methodology produces accurate forecasts while requiring little to none manual work.
Adjoint Sensitivity Analysis on Multi-Scale Bioprocess Stochastic Reaction Network
Authors: Keilung Choy, Wei Xie
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

Motivated by the pressing challenges in the digital twin development for biomanufacturing systems, we introduce an adjoint sensitivity analysis (SA) approach to expedite the learning of mechanistic model parameters. In this paper, we consider enzymatic stochastic reaction networks representing a multi-scale bioprocess mechanistic model that allows us to integrate disparate data from diverse production processes and leverage the information from existing macro-kinetic and genome-scale models. To support forward prediction and backward reasoning, we develop a convergent adjoint SA algorithm studying how the perturbations of model parameters and inputs (e.g., initial state) propagate through enzymatic reaction networks and impact on output trajectory predictions. This SA can provide a sample efficient and interpretable way to assess the sensitivities between inputs and outputs accounting for their causal dependencies. Our empirical study underscores the resilience of these sensitivities and illuminates a deeper comprehension of the regulatory mechanisms behind bioprocess through sensitivities.
Generative adversarial learning with optimal input dimension and its adaptive generator architecture
Authors: Zhiyao Tan, Ling Zhou, Huazhen Lin
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

We investigate the impact of the input dimension on the generalization error in generative adversarial networks (GANs). In particular, we first provide both theoretical and practical evidence to validate the existence of an optimal input dimension (OID) that minimizes the generalization error. Then, to identify the OID, we introduce a novel framework called generalized GANs (G-GANs), which includes existing GANs as a special case. By incorporating the group penalty and the architecture penalty developed in the paper, G-GANs have several intriguing features. First, our framework offers adaptive dimensionality reduction from the initial dimension to a dimension necessary for generating the target distribution. Second, this reduction in dimensionality also shrinks the required size of the generator network architecture, which is automatically identified by the proposed architecture penalty. Both reductions in dimensionality and the generator network significantly improve the stability and the accuracy of the estimation and prediction. Theoretical support for the consistent selection of the input dimension and the generator network is provided. Third, the proposed algorithm involves an end-to-end training process, and the algorithm allows for dynamic adjustments between the input dimension and the generator network during training, further enhancing the overall performance of G-GANs. Extensive experiments conducted with simulated and benchmark data demonstrate the superior performance of G-GANs. In particular, compared to that of off-the-shelf methods, G-GANs achieves an average improvement of 45.68% in the CT slice dataset, 43.22% in the MNIST dataset and 46.94% in the FashionMNIST dataset in terms of the maximum mean discrepancy or Frechet inception distance. Moreover, the features generated based on the input dimensions identified by G-GANs align with visually significant features.
Spatial Transfer Learning with Simple MLP
Authors: Hongjian Yang
Date: 2024-05-05 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

First step to investigate the potential of transfer learning applied to the field of spatial statistics
BBK: a simpler, faster algorithm for enumerating maximal bicliques in large sparse bipartite graphs
Authors: Alexis Baudin, Clémence Magnien, Lionel Tabourier
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00

Bipartite graphs are a prevalent modeling tool for real-world networks, capturing interactions between vertices of two different types. Within this framework, bicliques emerge as crucial structures when studying dense subgraphs: they are sets of vertices such that all vertices of the first type interact with all vertices of the second type. Therefore, they allow identifying groups of closely related vertices of the network, such as individuals with similar interests or webpages with similar contents. This article introduces a new algorithm designed for the exhaustive enumeration of maximal bicliques within a bipartite graph. This algorithm, called BBK for Bipartite Bron-Kerbosch, is a new extension to the bipartite case of the Bron-Kerbosch algorithm, which enumerates the maximal cliques in standard (non-bipartite) graphs. It is faster than the state-of-the-art algorithms and allows the enumeration on massive bipartite graphs that are not manageable with existing implementations. We analyze it theoretically to establish two complexity formulas: one as a function of the input and one as a function of the output characteristics of the algorithm. We also provide an open-access implementation of BBK in C++, which we use to experiment and validate its efficiency on massive real-world datasets and show that its execution time is shorter in practice than state-of-the art algorithms. These experiments also show that the order in which the vertices are processed, as well as the choice of one of the two types of vertices on which to initiate the enumeration have an impact on the computation time.
Dataset and Models for Item Recommendation Using Multi-Modal User Interactions
Authors: Simone Borg Bruun, Krisztian Balog, Maria Maistro
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

While recommender systems with multi-modal item representations (image, audio, and text), have been widely explored, learning recommendations from multi-modal user interactions (e.g., clicks and speech) remains an open problem. We study the case of multi-modal user interactions in a setting where users engage with a service provider through multiple channels (website and call center). In such cases, incomplete modalities naturally occur, since not all users interact through all the available channels. To address these challenges, we publish a real-world dataset that allows progress in this under-researched area. We further present and benchmark various methods for leveraging multi-modal user interactions for item recommendations, and propose a novel approach that specifically deals with missing modalities by mapping user interactions to a common feature space. Our analysis reveals important interactions between the different modalities and that a frequently occurring modality can enhance learning from a less frequent one.
Masked Graph Transformer for Large-Scale Recommendation
Authors: Huiyuan Chen, Zhe Xu, Chin-Chia Michael Yeh, Vivian Lai, Yan Zheng, Minghua Xu, Hanghang Tong
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00

Graph Transformers have garnered significant attention for learning graph-structured data, thanks to their superb ability to capture long-range dependencies among nodes. However, the quadratic space and time complexity hinders the scalability of Graph Transformers, particularly for large-scale recommendation. Here we propose an efficient Masked Graph Transformer, named MGFormer, capable of capturing all-pair interactions among nodes with a linear complexity. To achieve this, we treat all user/item nodes as independent tokens, enhance them with positional embeddings, and feed them into a kernelized attention module. Additionally, we incorporate learnable relative degree information to appropriately reweigh the attentions. Experimental results show the superior performance of our MGFormer, even with a single attention layer.
Contextualization with SPLADE for High Recall Retrieval
Authors: Eugene Yang
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, TAR

High Recall Retrieval (HRR), such as eDiscovery and medical systematic review, is a search problem that optimizes the cost of retrieving most relevant documents in a given collection. Iterative approaches, such as iterative relevance feedback and uncertainty sampling, are shown to be effective under various operational scenarios. Despite neural models demonstrating success in other text-related tasks, linear models such as logistic regression, in general, are still more effective and efficient in HRR since the model is trained and retrieves documents from the same fixed collection. In this work, we leverage SPLADE, an efficient retrieval model that transforms documents into contextualized sparse vectors, for HRR. Our approach combines the best of both worlds, leveraging both the contextualization from pretrained language models and the efficiency of linear models. It reduces 10% and 18% of the review cost in two HRR evaluation collections under a one-phase review workflow with a target recall of 80%. The experiment is implemented with TARexp and is available at https://github.com/eugene-yang/LSR-for-TAR.
The Fault in Our Recommendations: On the Perils of Optimizing the Measurable
Authors: Omar Besbes, Yash Kanoria, Akshit Kumar
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Recommendation systems are widespread, and through customized recommendations, promise to match users with options they will like. To that end, data on engagement is collected and used. Most recommendation systems are ranking-based, where they rank and recommend items based on their predicted engagement. However, the engagement signals are often only a crude proxy for utility, as data on the latter is rarely collected or available. This paper explores the following question: By optimizing for measurable proxies, are recommendation systems at risk of significantly under-delivering on utility? If so, how can one improve utility which is seldom measured? To study these questions, we introduce a model of repeated user consumption in which, at each interaction, users select between an outside option and the best option from a recommendation set. Our model accounts for user heterogeneity, with the majority preferring ``popular'' content, and a minority favoring ``niche'' content. The system initially lacks knowledge of individual user preferences but can learn them through observations of users' choices over time. Our theoretical and numerical analysis demonstrate that optimizing for engagement can lead to significant utility losses. Instead, we propose a utility-aware policy that initially recommends a mix of popular and niche content. As the platform becomes more forward-looking, our utility-aware policy achieves the best of both worlds: near-optimal utility and near-optimal engagement simultaneously. Our study elucidates an important feature of recommendation systems; given the ability to suggest multiple items, one can perform significant exploration without incurring significant reductions in engagement. By recommending high-risk, high-reward items alongside popular items, systems can enhance discovery of high utility items without significantly affecting engagement.
Spiking PointNet: Spiking Neural Networks for Point Clouds
Authors: Dayong Ren, Zhe Ma, Yuanpei Chen, Weihang Peng, Xiaode Liu, Yuhan Zhang, Yufei Guo
Date: 2023-10-10 00:00:00
Proceeding: NeurIPS 2023 11

Recently, Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs), enjoying extreme energy efficiency, have drawn much research attention on 2D visual recognition and shown gradually increasing application potential. However, it still remains underexplored whether SNNs can be generalized to 3D recognition. To this end, we present Spiking PointNet in the paper, the first spiking neural model for efficient deep learning on point clouds. We discover that the two huge obstacles limiting the application of SNNs in point clouds are: the intrinsic optimization obstacle of SNNs that impedes the training of a big spiking model with large time steps, and the expensive memory and computation cost of PointNet that makes training a big spiking point model unrealistic. To solve the problems simultaneously, we present a trained-less but learning-more paradigm for Spiking PointNet with theoretical justifications and in-depth experimental analysis. In specific, our Spiking PointNet is trained with only a single time step but can obtain better performance with multiple time steps inference, compared to the one trained directly with multiple time steps. We conduct various experiments on ModelNet10, ModelNet40 to demonstrate the effectiveness of Spiking PointNet. Notably, our Spiking PointNet even can outperform its ANN counterpart, which is rare in the SNN field thus providing a potential research direction for the following work. Moreover, Spiking PointNet shows impressive speedup and storage saving in the training phase.
Lumbar Spine Tumor Segmentation and Localization in T2 MRI Images Using AI
Authors: Rikathi Pal, Sudeshna Mondal, Aditi Gupta, Priya Saha, Somoballi Ghoshal, Amlan Chakrabarti, Susmita Sur-Kolay
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Decision Making, Diagnostic, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Tumor Segmentation

In medical imaging, segmentation and localization of spinal tumors in three-dimensional (3D) space pose significant computational challenges, primarily stemming from limited data availability. In response, this study introduces a novel data augmentation technique, aimed at automating spine tumor segmentation and localization through AI approaches. Leveraging a fusion of fuzzy c-means clustering and Random Forest algorithms, the proposed method achieves successful spine tumor segmentation based on predefined masks initially delineated by domain experts in medical imaging. Subsequently, a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) architecture is employed for tumor classification. Moreover, 3D vertebral segmentation and labeling techniques are used to help pinpoint the exact location of the tumors in the lumbar spine. Results indicate a remarkable performance, with 99% accuracy for tumor segmentation, 98% accuracy for tumor classification, and 99% accuracy for tumor localization achieved with the proposed approach. These metrics surpass the efficacy of existing state-of-the-art techniques, as evidenced by superior Dice Score, Class Accuracy, and Intersection over Union (IOU) on class accuracy metrics. This innovative methodology holds promise for enhancing the diagnostic capabilities in detecting and characterizing spinal tumors, thereby facilitating more effective clinical decision-making.
SEED-Data-Edit Technical Report: A Hybrid Dataset for Instructional Image Editing
Authors: Yuying Ge, Sijie Zhao, Chen Li, Yixiao Ge, Ying Shan
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Manipulation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Multimodal Large Language Model

In this technical report, we introduce SEED-Data-Edit: a unique hybrid dataset for instruction-guided image editing, which aims to facilitate image manipulation using open-form language. SEED-Data-Edit is composed of three distinct types of data: (1) High-quality editing data produced by an automated pipeline, ensuring a substantial volume of diverse image editing pairs. (2) Real-world scenario data collected from the internet, which captures the intricacies of user intentions for promoting the practical application of image editing in the real world. (3) High-precision multi-turn editing data annotated by humans, which involves multiple rounds of edits for simulating iterative editing processes. The combination of these diverse data sources makes SEED-Data-Edit a comprehensive and versatile dataset for training language-guided image editing model. We fine-tune a pretrained Multimodal Large Language Model (MLLM) that unifies comprehension and generation with SEED-Data-Edit. The instruction tuned model demonstrates promising results, indicating the potential and effectiveness of SEED-Data-Edit in advancing the field of instructional image editing. The datasets are released in https://huggingface.co/datasets/AILab-CVC/SEED-Data-Edit.
Deep Event-based Object Detection in Autonomous Driving: A Survey
Authors: Bingquan Zhou, Jie Jiang
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Object detection plays a critical role in autonomous driving, where accurately and efficiently detecting objects in fast-moving scenes is crucial. Traditional frame-based cameras face challenges in balancing latency and bandwidth, necessitating the need for innovative solutions. Event cameras have emerged as promising sensors for autonomous driving due to their low latency, high dynamic range, and low power consumption. However, effectively utilizing the asynchronous and sparse event data presents challenges, particularly in maintaining low latency and lightweight architectures for object detection. This paper provides an overview of object detection using event data in autonomous driving, showcasing the competitive benefits of event cameras.
VMambaCC: A Visual State Space Model for Crowd Counting
Authors: Hao-Yuan Ma, Li Zhang, Shuai Shi
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Crowd Counting, image-classification, Image Classification, Mamba

As a deep learning model, Visual Mamba (VMamba) has a low computational complexity and a global receptive field, which has been successful applied to image classification and detection. To extend its applications, we apply VMamba to crowd counting and propose a novel VMambaCC (VMamba Crowd Counting) model. Naturally, VMambaCC inherits the merits of VMamba, or global modeling for images and low computational cost. Additionally, we design a Multi-head High-level Feature (MHF) attention mechanism for VMambaCC. MHF is a new attention mechanism that leverages high-level semantic features to augment low-level semantic features, thereby enhancing spatial feature representation with greater precision. Building upon MHF, we further present a High-level Semantic Supervised Feature Pyramid Network (HS2PFN) that progressively integrates and enhances high-level semantic information with low-level semantic information. Extensive experimental results on five public datasets validate the efficacy of our approach. For example, our method achieves a mean absolute error of 51.87 and a mean squared error of 81.3 on the ShangHaiTech\_PartA dataset. Our code is coming soon.
Unified End-to-End V2X Cooperative Autonomous Driving
Authors: Zhiwei Li, Bozhen Zhang, Lei Yang, Tianyu Shen, Nuo Xu, Ruosen Hao, Weiting Li, Tao Yan, Huaping Liu
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, motion prediction

V2X cooperation, through the integration of sensor data from both vehicles and infrastructure, is considered a pivotal approach to advancing autonomous driving technology. Current research primarily focuses on enhancing perception accuracy, often overlooking the systematic improvement of accident prediction accuracy through end-to-end learning, leading to insufficient attention to the safety issues of autonomous driving. To address this challenge, this paper introduces the UniE2EV2X framework, a V2X-integrated end-to-end autonomous driving system that consolidates key driving modules within a unified network. The framework employs a deformable attention-based data fusion strategy, effectively facilitating cooperation between vehicles and infrastructure. The main advantages include: 1) significantly enhancing agents' perception and motion prediction capabilities, thereby improving the accuracy of accident predictions; 2) ensuring high reliability in the data fusion process; 3) superior end-to-end perception compared to modular approaches. Furthermore, We implement the UniE2EV2X framework on the challenging DeepAccident, a simulation dataset designed for V2X cooperative driving.