pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SparseDM: Toward Sparse Efficient Diffusion Models
Authors: Kafeng Wang, Jianfei Chen, He Li, Zhenpeng Mi, Jun Zhu
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Video Generation

Diffusion models represent a powerful family of generative models widely used for image and video generation. However, the time-consuming deployment, long inference time, and requirements on large memory hinder their applications on resource constrained devices. In this paper, we propose a method based on the improved Straight-Through Estimator to improve the deployment efficiency of diffusion models. Specifically, we add sparse masks to the Convolution and Linear layers in a pre-trained diffusion model, then transfer learn the sparse model during the fine-tuning stage and turn on the sparse masks during inference. Experimental results on a Transformer and UNet-based diffusion models demonstrate that our method reduces MACs by 50% while maintaining FID. Sparse models are accelerated by approximately 1.2x on the GPU. Under other MACs conditions, the FID is also lower than 1 compared to other methods.
AGHINT: Attribute-Guided Representation Learning on Heterogeneous Information Networks with Transformer
Authors: Jinhui Yuan, Shan Lu, Peibo Duan, Jieyue He
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Node Classification, Representation Learning

Recently, heterogeneous graph neural networks (HGNNs) have achieved impressive success in representation learning by capturing long-range dependencies and heterogeneity at the node level. However, few existing studies have delved into the utilization of node attributes in heterogeneous information networks (HINs). In this paper, we investigate the impact of inter-node attribute disparities on HGNNs performance within the benchmark task, i.e., node classification, and empirically find that typical models exhibit significant performance decline when classifying nodes whose attributes markedly differ from their neighbors. To alleviate this issue, we propose a novel Attribute-Guided heterogeneous Information Networks representation learning model with Transformer (AGHINT), which allows a more effective aggregation of neighbor node information under the guidance of attributes. Specifically, AGHINT transcends the constraints of the original graph structure by directly integrating higher-order similar neighbor features into the learning process and modifies the message-passing mechanism between nodes based on their attribute disparities. Extensive experimental results on three real-world heterogeneous graph benchmarks with target node attributes demonstrate that AGHINT outperforms the state-of-the-art.
Explainable concept mappings of MRI: Revealing the mechanisms underlying deep learning-based brain disease classification
Authors: Christian Tinauer, Anna Damulina, Maximilian Sackl, Martin Soellradl, Reduan Achtibat, Maximilian Dreyer, Frederik Pahde, Sebastian Lapuschkin, Reinhold Schmidt, Stefan Ropele, Wojciech Samek, Christian Langkammer
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00

Motivation. While recent studies show high accuracy in the classification of Alzheimer's disease using deep neural networks, the underlying learned concepts have not been investigated. Goals. To systematically identify changes in brain regions through concepts learned by the deep neural network for model validation. Approach. Using quantitative R2* maps we separated Alzheimer's patients (n=117) from normal controls (n=219) by using a convolutional neural network and systematically investigated the learned concepts using Concept Relevance Propagation and compared these results to a conventional region of interest-based analysis. Results. In line with established histological findings and the region of interest-based analyses, highly relevant concepts were primarily found in and adjacent to the basal ganglia. Impact. The identification of concepts learned by deep neural networks for disease classification enables validation of the models and could potentially improve reliability.
MEEL: Multi-Modal Event Evolution Learning
Authors: Zhengwei Tao, Zhi Jin, Junqiang Huang, Xiancai Chen, Xiaoying Bai, Haiyan Zhao, Yifan Zhang, Chongyang Tao
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00

Multi-modal Event Reasoning (MMER) endeavors to endow machines with the ability to comprehend intricate event relations across diverse data modalities. MMER is fundamental and underlies a wide broad of applications. Despite extensive instruction fine-tuning, current multi-modal large language models still fall short in such ability. The disparity stems from that existing models are insufficient to capture underlying principles governing event evolution in various scenarios. In this paper, we introduce Multi-Modal Event Evolution Learning (MEEL) to enable the model to grasp the event evolution mechanism, yielding advanced MMER ability. Specifically, we commence with the design of event diversification to gather seed events from a rich spectrum of scenarios. Subsequently, we employ ChatGPT to generate evolving graphs for these seed events. We propose an instruction encapsulation process that formulates the evolving graphs into instruction-tuning data, aligning the comprehension of event reasoning to humans. Finally, we observe that models trained in this way are still struggling to fully comprehend event evolution. In such a case, we propose the guiding discrimination strategy, in which models are trained to discriminate the improper evolution direction. We collect and curate a benchmark M-EV2 for MMER. Extensive experiments on M-EV2 validate the effectiveness of our approach, showcasing competitive performance in open-source multi-modal LLMs.
Optimizing BioTac Simulation for Realistic Tactile Perception
Authors: Wadhah Zai El Amri, Nicolás Navarro-Guerrero
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00

Tactile sensing presents a promising opportunity for enhancing the interaction capabilities of today's robots. BioTac is a commonly used tactile sensor that enables robots to perceive and respond to physical tactile stimuli. However, the sensor's non-linearity poses challenges in simulating its behavior. In this paper, we first investigate a BioTac simulation that uses temperature, force, and contact point positions to predict the sensor outputs. We show that training with BioTac temperature readings does not yield accurate sensor output predictions during deployment. Consequently, we tested three alternative models, i.e., an XGBoost regressor, a neural network, and a transformer encoder. We train these models without temperature readings and provide a detailed investigation of the window size of the input vectors. We demonstrate that we achieve statistically significant improvements over the baseline network. Furthermore, our results reveal that the XGBoost regressor and transformer outperform traditional feed-forward neural networks in this task. We make all our code and results available online on https://github.com/wzaielamri/Optimizing_BioTac_Simulation.
Disentangling Instructive Information from Ranked Multiple Candidates for Multi-Document Scientific Summarization
Authors: Pancheng Wang, Shasha Li, Dong Li, Kehan Long, Jintao Tang, Ting Wang
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Automatically condensing multiple topic-related scientific papers into a succinct and concise summary is referred to as Multi-Document Scientific Summarization (MDSS). Currently, while commonly used abstractive MDSS methods can generate flexible and coherent summaries, the difficulty in handling global information and the lack of guidance during decoding still make it challenging to generate better summaries. To alleviate these two shortcomings, this paper introduces summary candidates into MDSS, utilizing the global information of the document set and additional guidance from the summary candidates to guide the decoding process. Our insights are twofold: Firstly, summary candidates can provide instructive information from both positive and negative perspectives, and secondly, selecting higher-quality candidates from multiple options contributes to producing better summaries. Drawing on the insights, we propose a summary candidates fusion framework -- Disentangling Instructive information from Ranked candidates (DIR) for MDSS. Specifically, DIR first uses a specialized pairwise comparison method towards multiple candidates to pick out those of higher quality. Then DIR disentangles the instructive information of summary candidates into positive and negative latent variables with Conditional Variational Autoencoder. These variables are further incorporated into the decoder to guide generation. We evaluate our approach with three different types of Transformer-based models and three different types of candidates, and consistently observe noticeable performance improvements according to automatic and human evaluation. More analyses further demonstrate the effectiveness of our model in handling global information and enhancing decoding controllability.
Integration of Self-Supervised BYOL in Semi-Supervised Medical Image Recognition
Authors: Hao Feng, Yuanzhe Jia, Ruijia Xu, Mukesh Prasad, Ali Anaissi, Ali Braytee
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning

Image recognition techniques heavily rely on abundant labeled data, particularly in medical contexts. Addressing the challenges associated with obtaining labeled data has led to the prominence of self-supervised learning and semi-supervised learning, especially in scenarios with limited annotated data. In this paper, we proposed an innovative approach by integrating self-supervised learning into semi-supervised models to enhance medical image recognition. Our methodology commences with pre-training on unlabeled data utilizing the BYOL method. Subsequently, we merge pseudo-labeled and labeled datasets to construct a neural network classifier, refining it through iterative fine-tuning. Experimental results on three different datasets demonstrate that our approach optimally leverages unlabeled data, outperforming existing methods in terms of accuracy for medical image recognition.
Offline Trajectory Generalization for Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Ziqi Zhao, Zhaochun Ren, Liu Yang, Fajie Yuan, Pengjie Ren, Zhumin Chen, Jun Ma, Xin Xin
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: D4RL, Data Augmentation, Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) aims to learn policies from static datasets of previously collected trajectories. Existing methods for offline RL either constrain the learned policy to the support of offline data or utilize model-based virtual environments to generate simulated rollouts. However, these methods suffer from (i) poor generalization to unseen states; and (ii) trivial improvement from low-qualified rollout simulation. In this paper, we propose offline trajectory generalization through world transformers for offline reinforcement learning (OTTO). Specifically, we use casual Transformers, a.k.a. World Transformers, to predict state dynamics and the immediate reward. Then we propose four strategies to use World Transformers to generate high-rewarded trajectory simulation by perturbing the offline data. Finally, we jointly use offline data with simulated data to train an offline RL algorithm. OTTO serves as a plug-in module and can be integrated with existing offline RL methods to enhance them with better generalization capability of transformers and high-rewarded data augmentation. Conducting extensive experiments on D4RL benchmark datasets, we verify that OTTO significantly outperforms state-of-the-art offline RL methods.
CNN-based explanation ensembling for dataset, representation and explanations evaluation
Authors: Weronika Hryniewska-Guzik, Luca Longo, Przemysław Biecek
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence

Explainable Artificial Intelligence has gained significant attention due to the widespread use of complex deep learning models in high-stake domains such as medicine, finance, and autonomous cars. However, different explanations often present different aspects of the model's behavior. In this research manuscript, we explore the potential of ensembling explanations generated by deep classification models using convolutional model. Through experimentation and analysis, we aim to investigate the implications of combining explanations to uncover a more coherent and reliable patterns of the model's behavior, leading to the possibility of evaluating the representation learned by the model. With our method, we can uncover problems of under-representation of images in a certain class. Moreover, we discuss other side benefits like features' reduction by replacing the original image with its explanations resulting in the removal of some sensitive information. Through the use of carefully selected evaluation metrics from the Quantus library, we demonstrated the method's superior performance in terms of Localisation and Faithfulness, compared to individual explanations.
I/O in Machine Learning Applications on HPC Systems: A 360-degree Survey
Authors: Noah Lewis, Jean Luca Bez, Surendra Byna
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Growing interest in Artificial Intelligence (AI) has resulted in a surge in demand for faster methods of Machine Learning (ML) model training and inference. This demand for speed has prompted the use of high performance computing (HPC) systems that excel in managing distributed workloads. Because data is the main fuel for AI applications, the performance of the storage and I/O subsystem of HPC systems is critical. In the past, HPC applications accessed large portions of data written by simulations or experiments or ingested data for visualizations or analysis tasks. ML workloads perform small reads spread across a large number of random files. This shift of I/O access patterns poses several challenges to modern parallel storage systems. In this paper, we survey I/O in ML applications on HPC systems, and target literature within a 6-year time window from 2019 to 2024. We define the scope of the survey, provide an overview of the common phases of ML, review available profilers and benchmarks, examine the I/O patterns encountered during offline data preparation, training, and inference, and explore I/O optimizations utilized in modern ML frameworks and proposed in recent literature. Lastly, we seek to expose research gaps that could spawn further R&D.
Reasoning on Efficient Knowledge Paths:Knowledge Graph Guides Large Language Model for Domain Question Answering
Authors: Yuqi Wang, Boran Jiang, Yi Luo, Dawei He, Peng Cheng, Liangcai Gao
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Question Answering, Triplet

Large language models (LLMs), such as GPT3.5, GPT4 and LLAMA2 perform surprisingly well and outperform human experts on many tasks. However, in many domain-specific evaluations, these LLMs often suffer from hallucination problems due to insufficient training of relevant corpus. Furthermore, fine-tuning large models may face problems such as the LLMs are not open source or the construction of high-quality domain instruction is difficult. Therefore, structured knowledge databases such as knowledge graph can better provide domain back- ground knowledge for LLMs and make full use of the reasoning and analysis capabilities of LLMs. In some previous works, LLM was called multiple times to determine whether the current triplet was suitable for inclusion in the subgraph when retrieving subgraphs through a question. Especially for the question that require a multi-hop reasoning path, frequent calls to LLM will consume a lot of computing power. Moreover, when choosing the reasoning path, LLM will be called once for each step, and if one of the steps is selected incorrectly, it will lead to the accumulation of errors in the following steps. In this paper, we integrated and optimized a pipeline for selecting reasoning paths from KG based on LLM, which can reduce the dependency on LLM. In addition, we propose a simple and effective subgraph retrieval method based on chain of thought (CoT) and page rank which can returns the paths most likely to contain the answer. We conduct experiments on three datasets: GenMedGPT-5k [14], WebQuestions [2], and CMCQA [21]. Finally, RoK can demonstrate that using fewer LLM calls can achieve the same results as previous SOTAs models.
Second Edition FRCSyn Challenge at CVPR 2024: Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data
Authors: Ivan DeAndres-Tame, Ruben Tolosana, Pietro Melzi, Ruben Vera-Rodriguez, Minchul Kim, Christian Rathgeb, Xiaoming Liu, Aythami Morales, Julian Fierrez, Javier Ortega-Garcia, Zhizhou Zhong, Yuge Huang, Yuxi Mi, Shouhong Ding, Shuigeng Zhou, Shuai He, Lingzhi Fu, Heng Cong, Rongyu Zhang, Zhihong Xiao, Evgeny Smirnov, Anton Pimenov, Aleksei Grigorev, Denis Timoshenko, Kaleb Mesfin Asfaw, Cheng Yaw Low, Hao liu, Chuyi Wang, Qing Zuo, Zhixiang He, Hatef Otroshi Shahreza, Anjith George, Alexander Unnervik, Parsa Rahimi, Sébastien Marcel, Pedro C. Neto, Marco Huber, Jan Niklas Kolf, Naser Damer, Fadi Boutros, Jaime S. Cardoso, Ana F. Sequeira, Andrea Atzori, Gianni Fenu, Mirko Marras, Vitomir Štruc, Jiang Yu, Zhangjie Li, Jichun Li, Weisong Zhao, Zhen Lei, Xiangyu Zhu, Xiao-Yu Zhang, Bernardo Biesseck, Pedro Vidal, Luiz Coelho, Roger Granada, David Menotti
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Face Recognition, Synthetic Face Recognition

Synthetic data is gaining increasing relevance for training machine learning models. This is mainly motivated due to several factors such as the lack of real data and intra-class variability, time and errors produced in manual labeling, and in some cases privacy concerns, among others. This paper presents an overview of the 2nd edition of the Face Recognition Challenge in the Era of Synthetic Data (FRCSyn) organized at CVPR 2024. FRCSyn aims to investigate the use of synthetic data in face recognition to address current technological limitations, including data privacy concerns, demographic biases, generalization to novel scenarios, and performance constraints in challenging situations such as aging, pose variations, and occlusions. Unlike the 1st edition, in which synthetic data from DCFace and GANDiffFace methods was only allowed to train face recognition systems, in this 2nd edition we propose new sub-tasks that allow participants to explore novel face generative methods. The outcomes of the 2nd FRCSyn Challenge, along with the proposed experimental protocol and benchmarking contribute significantly to the application of synthetic data to face recognition.
Generating Counterfactual Trajectories with Latent Diffusion Models for Concept Discovery
Authors: Payal Varshney, Adriano Lucieri, Christoph Balada, Andreas Dengel, Sheraz Ahmed
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: counterfactual, Image Generation

Trustworthiness is a major prerequisite for the safe application of opaque deep learning models in high-stakes domains like medicine. Understanding the decision-making process not only contributes to fostering trust but might also reveal previously unknown decision criteria of complex models that could advance the state of medical research. The discovery of decision-relevant concepts from black box models is a particularly challenging task. This study proposes Concept Discovery through Latent Diffusion-based Counterfactual Trajectories (CDCT), a novel three-step framework for concept discovery leveraging the superior image synthesis capabilities of diffusion models. In the first step, CDCT uses a Latent Diffusion Model (LDM) to generate a counterfactual trajectory dataset. This dataset is used to derive a disentangled representation of classification-relevant concepts using a Variational Autoencoder (VAE). Finally, a search algorithm is applied to identify relevant concepts in the disentangled latent space. The application of CDCT to a classifier trained on the largest public skin lesion dataset revealed not only the presence of several biases but also meaningful biomarkers. Moreover, the counterfactuals generated within CDCT show better FID scores than those produced by a previously established state-of-the-art method, while being 12 times more resource-efficient. Unsupervised concept discovery holds great potential for the application of trustworthy AI and the further development of human knowledge in various domains. CDCT represents a further step in this direction.
Exploring the Role of Token in Transformer-based Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Jianqi Zhang, Jingyao Wang, Chuxiong Sun, Xingchen Shen, Fanjiang Xu, Changwen Zheng, Wenwen Qiang
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Transformer-based methods are a mainstream approach for solving time series forecasting (TSF). These methods use temporal or variable tokens from observable data to make predictions. However, most focus on optimizing the model structure, with few studies paying attention to the role of tokens for predictions. The role is crucial since a model that distinguishes useful tokens from useless ones will predict more effectively. In this paper, we explore this issue. Through theoretical analyses, we find that the gradients mainly depend on tokens that contribute to the predicted series, called positive tokens. Based on this finding, we explore what helps models select these positive tokens. Through a series of experiments, we obtain three observations: i) positional encoding (PE) helps the model identify positive tokens; ii) as the network depth increases, the PE information gradually weakens, affecting the model's ability to identify positive tokens in deeper layers; iii) both enhancing PE in the deeper layers and using semantic-based PE can improve the model's ability to identify positive tokens, thus boosting performance. Inspired by these findings, we design temporal positional encoding (T-PE) for temporal tokens and variable positional encoding (V-PE) for variable tokens. To utilize T-PE and V-PE, we propose T2B-PE, a Transformer-based dual-branch framework. Extensive experiments demonstrate that T2B-PE has superior robustness and effectiveness.
Prescribing the Right Remedy: Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models via Targeted Instruction Tuning
Authors: Rui Hu, Yahan Tu, Jitao Sang
Date: 2024-04-16 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Hallucination, Specificity

Despite achieving outstanding performance on various cross-modal tasks, current large vision-language models (LVLMs) still suffer from hallucination issues, manifesting as inconsistencies between their generated responses and the corresponding images. Prior research has implicated that the low quality of instruction data, particularly the skewed balance between positive and negative samples, is a significant contributor to model hallucinations. Recently, researchers have proposed high-quality instruction datasets, such as LRV-Instruction, to mitigate model hallucination. Nonetheless, our investigation reveals that hallucinatory concepts from different LVLMs exhibit specificity, i.e. the distribution of hallucinatory concepts varies significantly across models. Existing datasets did not consider the hallucination specificity of different models in the design processes, thereby diminishing their efficacy in mitigating model hallucination. In this paper, we propose a targeted instruction data generation framework named DFTG that tailored to the hallucination specificity of different models. Concretely, DFTG consists of two stages: hallucination diagnosis, which extracts the necessary information from the model's responses and images for hallucination diagnosis; and targeted data generation, which generates targeted instruction data based on diagnostic results. The experimental results on hallucination benchmarks demonstrate that the targeted instruction data generated by our method are more effective in mitigating hallucinations compared to previous datasets.