pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Automatic AI controller that can drive with confidence: steering vehicle with uncertainty knowledge
Authors: Neha Kumari, Sumit Kumar. Sneha Priya, Ayush Kumar, Akash Fogla
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Uncertainty Quantification

In safety-critical systems that interface with the real world, the role of uncertainty in decision-making is pivotal, particularly in the context of machine learning models. For the secure functioning of Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS), it is imperative to manage such uncertainty adeptly. In this research, we focus on the development of a vehicle's lateral control system using a machine learning framework. Specifically, we employ a Bayesian Neural Network (BNN), a probabilistic learning model, to address uncertainty quantification. This capability allows us to gauge the level of confidence or uncertainty in the model's predictions. The BNN based controller is trained using simulated data gathered from the vehicle traversing a single track and subsequently tested on various other tracks. We want to share two significant results: firstly, the trained model demonstrates the ability to adapt and effectively control the vehicle on multiple similar tracks. Secondly, the quantification of prediction confidence integrated into the controller serves as an early-warning system, signaling when the algorithm lacks confidence in its predictions and is therefore susceptible to failure. By establishing a confidence threshold, we can trigger manual intervention, ensuring that control is relinquished from the algorithm when it operates outside of safe parameters.
Attacks on Third-Party APIs of Large Language Models
Authors: Wanru Zhao, Vidit Khazanchi, Haodi Xing, Xuanli He, Qiongkai Xu, Nicholas Donald Lane
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large language model (LLM) services have recently begun offering a plugin ecosystem to interact with third-party API services. This innovation enhances the capabilities of LLMs, but it also introduces risks, as these plugins developed by various third parties cannot be easily trusted. This paper proposes a new attacking framework to examine security and safety vulnerabilities within LLM platforms that incorporate third-party services. Applying our framework specifically to widely used LLMs, we identify real-world malicious attacks across various domains on third-party APIs that can imperceptibly modify LLM outputs. The paper discusses the unique challenges posed by third-party API integration and offers strategic possibilities to improve the security and safety of LLM ecosystems moving forward. Our code is released at https://github.com/vk0812/Third-Party-Attacks-on-LLMs.
NEPENTHE: Entropy-Based Pruning as a Neural Network Depth's Reducer
Authors: Zhu Liao, Victor Quétu, Van-Tam Nguyen, Enzo Tartaglione
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00

While deep neural networks are highly effective at solving complex tasks, their computational demands can hinder their usefulness in real-time applications and with limited-resources systems. Besides, for many tasks it is known that these models are over-parametrized: neoteric works have broadly focused on reducing the width of these networks, rather than their depth. In this paper, we aim to reduce the depth of over-parametrized deep neural networks: we propose an eNtropy-basEd Pruning as a nEural Network depTH's rEducer (NEPENTHE) to alleviate deep neural networks' computational burden. Based on our theoretical finding, NEPENTHE focuses on un-structurally pruning connections in layers with low entropy to remove them entirely. We validate our approach on popular architectures such as MobileNet and Swin-T, showing that when encountering an over-parametrization regime, it can effectively linearize some layers (hence reducing the model's depth) with little to no performance loss. The code will be publicly available upon acceptance of the article.
Anomaly Detection for Incident Response at Scale
Authors: Hanzhang Wang, Gowtham Kumar Tangirala, Gilkara Pranav Naidu, Charles Mayville, Arighna Roy, Joanne Sun, Ramesh Babu Mandava
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Drift Detection

We present a machine learning-based anomaly detection product, AI Detect and Respond (AIDR), that monitors Walmart's business and system health in real-time. During the validation over 3 months, the product served predictions from over 3000 models to more than 25 application, platform, and operation teams, covering 63\% of major incidents and reducing the mean-time-to-detect (MTTD) by more than 7 minutes. Unlike previous anomaly detection methods, our solution leverages statistical, ML and deep learning models while continuing to incorporate rule-based static thresholds to incorporate domain-specific knowledge. Both univariate and multivariate ML models are deployed and maintained through distributed services for scalability and high availability. AIDR has a feedback loop that assesses model quality with a combination of drift detection algorithms and customer feedback. It also offers self-onboarding capabilities and customizability. AIDR has achieved success with various internal teams with lower time to detection and fewer false positives than previous methods. As we move forward, we aim to expand incident coverage and prevention, reduce noise, and integrate further with root cause recommendation (RCR) to enable an end-to-end AIDR experience.
Review of Data-centric Time Series Analysis from Sample, Feature, and Period
Authors: Chenxi Sun, Hongyan Li, Yaliang Li, Shenda Hong
Date: 2024-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Data is essential to performing time series analysis utilizing machine learning approaches, whether for classic models or today's large language models. A good time-series dataset is advantageous for the model's accuracy, robustness, and convergence, as well as task outcomes and costs. The emergence of data-centric AI represents a shift in the landscape from model refinement to prioritizing data quality. Even though time-series data processing methods frequently come up in a wide range of research fields, it hasn't been well investigated as a specific topic. To fill the gap, in this paper, we systematically review different data-centric methods in time series analysis, covering a wide range of research topics. Based on the time-series data characteristics at sample, feature, and period, we propose a taxonomy for the reviewed data selection methods. In addition to discussing and summarizing their characteristics, benefits, and drawbacks targeting time-series data, we also introduce the challenges and opportunities by proposing recommendations, open problems, and possible research topics.
Adapting an Artificial Intelligence Sexually Transmitted Diseases Symptom Checker Tool for Mpox Detection: The HeHealth Experience
Authors: Rayner Kay Jin Tan, Dilruk Perera, Salomi Arasaratnam, Yudara Kularathne
Date: 2024-04-23 00:00:00

Artificial Intelligence applications have shown promise in the management of pandemics and have been widely used to assist the identification, classification, and diagnosis of medical images. In response to the global outbreak of Monkeypox (Mpox), the HeHealth.ai team leveraged an existing tool to screen for sexually transmitted diseases to develop a digital screening test for symptomatic Mpox through AI approaches. Prior to the global outbreak of Mpox, the team developed a smartphone app, where app users can use their own smartphone cameras to take pictures of their own penises to screen for symptomatic STD. The AI model was initially developed using 5000 cases and use a modified convolutional neural network to output prediction scores across visually diagnosable penis pathologies including Syphilis, Herpes Simplex Virus, and Human Papilloma Virus. From June 2022 to October 2022, a total of about 22,000 users downloaded the HeHealth app, and about 21,000 images have been analyzed using HeHealth AI technology. We then engaged in formative research, stakeholder engagement, rapid consolidation images, a validation study, and implementation of the tool from July 2022. From July 2022 to October 2022, a total of 1000 Mpox related images had been used to train the Mpox symptom checker tool. Our digital symptom checker tool showed accuracy of 87% to rule in Mpox and 90% to rule out symptomatic Mpox. Several hurdles identified included issues of data privacy and security for app users, initial lack of data to train the AI tool, and the potential generalizability of input data. We offer several suggestions to help others get started on similar projects in emergency situations, including engaging a wide range of stakeholders, having a multidisciplinary team, prioritizing pragmatism, as well as the concept that big data in fact is made up of small data.
Aligning Knowledge Graphs Provided by Humans and Generated from Neural Networks in Specific Tasks
Authors: Tangrui Li, Jun Zhou
Date: 2024-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, Logical Reasoning

This paper develops an innovative method that enables neural networks to generate and utilize knowledge graphs, which describe their concept-level knowledge and optimize network parameters through alignment with human-provided knowledge. This research addresses a gap where traditionally, network-generated knowledge has been limited to applications in downstream symbolic analysis or enhancing network transparency. By integrating a novel autoencoder design with the Vector Symbolic Architecture (VSA), we have introduced auxiliary tasks that support end-to-end training. Our approach eschews traditional dependencies on ontologies or word embedding models, mining concepts from neural networks and directly aligning them with human knowledge. Experiments show that our method consistently captures network-generated concepts that align closely with human knowledge and can even uncover new, useful concepts not previously identified by humans. This plug-and-play strategy not only enhances the interpretability of neural networks but also facilitates the integration of symbolic logical reasoning within these systems.
Atomas: Hierarchical Alignment on Molecule-Text for Unified Molecule Understanding and Generation
Authors: Yikun Zhang, Geyan Ye, Chaohao Yuan, Bo Han, Long-Kai Huang, Jianhua Yao, Wei Liu, Yu Rong
Date: 2024-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, molecular representation, Molecule Captioning, Representation Learning

Molecule-and-text cross-modal representation learning has emerged as a promising direction for enhancing the quality of molecular representation, thereby improving performance in various scientific fields. However, most approaches employ a global alignment approach to learn the knowledge from different modalities that may fail to capture fine-grained information, such as molecule-and-text fragments and stereoisomeric nuances, which is crucial for downstream tasks. Furthermore, it is incapable of modeling such information using a similar global alignment strategy due to the lack of annotations about the fine-grained fragments in the existing dataset. In this paper, we propose Atomas, a hierarchical molecular representation learning framework that jointly learns representations from SMILES strings and text. We design a Hierarchical Adaptive Alignment model to automatically learn the fine-grained fragment correspondence between two modalities and align these representations at three semantic levels. Atomas's end-to-end training framework supports understanding and generating molecules, enabling a wider range of downstream tasks. Atomas achieves superior performance across 12 tasks on 11 datasets, outperforming 11 baseline models thus highlighting the effectiveness and versatility of our method. Scaling experiments further demonstrate Atomas's robustness and scalability. Moreover, visualization and qualitative analysis, validated by human experts, confirm the chemical relevance of our approach. Codes are released on https://github.com/yikunpku/Atomas.
Learning Control Barrier Functions and their application in Reinforcement Learning: A Survey
Authors: Maeva Guerrier, Hassan Fouad, Giovanni Beltrame
Date: 2024-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Lifelong learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Safe Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement learning is a powerful technique for developing new robot behaviors. However, typical lack of safety guarantees constitutes a hurdle for its practical application on real robots. To address this issue, safe reinforcement learning aims to incorporate safety considerations, enabling faster transfer to real robots and facilitating lifelong learning. One promising approach within safe reinforcement learning is the use of control barrier functions. These functions provide a framework to ensure that the system remains in a safe state during the learning process. However, synthesizing control barrier functions is not straightforward and often requires ample domain knowledge. This challenge motivates the exploration of data-driven methods for automatically defining control barrier functions, which is highly appealing. We conduct a comprehensive review of the existing literature on safe reinforcement learning using control barrier functions. Additionally, we investigate various techniques for automatically learning the Control Barrier Functions, aiming to enhance the safety and efficacy of Reinforcement Learning in practical robot applications.
Tunnel Try-on: Excavating Spatial-temporal Tunnels for High-quality Virtual Try-on in Videos
Authors: Zhengze Xu, Mengting Chen, Zhao Wang, Linyu Xing, Zhonghua Zhai, Nong Sang, Jinsong Lan, Shuai Xiao, Changxin Gao
Date: 2024-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Virtual Try-on

Video try-on is a challenging task and has not been well tackled in previous works. The main obstacle lies in preserving the details of the clothing and modeling the coherent motions simultaneously. Faced with those difficulties, we address video try-on by proposing a diffusion-based framework named "Tunnel Try-on." The core idea is excavating a "focus tunnel" in the input video that gives close-up shots around the clothing regions. We zoom in on the region in the tunnel to better preserve the fine details of the clothing. To generate coherent motions, we first leverage the Kalman filter to construct smooth crops in the focus tunnel and inject the position embedding of the tunnel into attention layers to improve the continuity of the generated videos. In addition, we develop an environment encoder to extract the context information outside the tunnels as supplementary cues. Equipped with these techniques, Tunnel Try-on keeps the fine details of the clothing and synthesizes stable and smooth videos. Demonstrating significant advancements, Tunnel Try-on could be regarded as the first attempt toward the commercial-level application of virtual try-on in videos.
MaPa: Text-driven Photorealistic Material Painting for 3D Shapes
Authors: Shangzhan Zhang, Sida Peng, Tao Xu, Yuanbo Yang, Tianrun Chen, Nan Xue, Yujun Shen, Hujun Bao, Ruizhen Hu, Xiaowei Zhou
Date: 2024-04-26 00:00:00

This paper aims to generate materials for 3D meshes from text descriptions. Unlike existing methods that synthesize texture maps, we propose to generate segment-wise procedural material graphs as the appearance representation, which supports high-quality rendering and provides substantial flexibility in editing. Instead of relying on extensive paired data, i.e., 3D meshes with material graphs and corresponding text descriptions, to train a material graph generative model, we propose to leverage the pre-trained 2D diffusion model as a bridge to connect the text and material graphs. Specifically, our approach decomposes a shape into a set of segments and designs a segment-controlled diffusion model to synthesize 2D images that are aligned with mesh parts. Based on generated images, we initialize parameters of material graphs and fine-tune them through the differentiable rendering module to produce materials in accordance with the textual description. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of our framework in photorealism, resolution, and editability over existing methods. Project page: https://zju3dv.github.io/MaPa
ChangeBind: A Hybrid Change Encoder for Remote Sensing Change Detection
Authors: Mubashir Noman, Mustansar Fiaz, Hisham Cholakkal
Date: 2024-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection

Change detection (CD) is a fundamental task in remote sensing (RS) which aims to detect the semantic changes between the same geographical regions at different time stamps. Existing convolutional neural networks (CNNs) based approaches often struggle to capture long-range dependencies. Whereas recent transformer-based methods are prone to the dominant global representation and may limit their capabilities to capture the subtle change regions due to the complexity of the objects in the scene. To address these limitations, we propose an effective Siamese-based framework to encode the semantic changes occurring in the bi-temporal RS images. The main focus of our design is to introduce a change encoder that leverages local and global feature representations to capture both subtle and large change feature information from multi-scale features to precisely estimate the change regions. Our experimental study on two challenging CD datasets reveals the merits of our approach and obtains state-of-the-art performance.
Exploring the Distinctiveness and Fidelity of the Descriptions Generated by Large Vision-Language Models
Authors: Yuhang Huang, Zihan Wu, Chongyang Gao, Jiawei Peng, Xu Yang
Date: 2024-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) are gaining traction for their remarkable ability to process and integrate visual and textual data. Despite their popularity, the capacity of LVLMs to generate precise, fine-grained textual descriptions has not been fully explored. This study addresses this gap by focusing on \textit{distinctiveness} and \textit{fidelity}, assessing how models like Open-Flamingo, IDEFICS, and MiniGPT-4 can distinguish between similar objects and accurately describe visual features. We proposed the Textual Retrieval-Augmented Classification (TRAC) framework, which, by leveraging its generative capabilities, allows us to delve deeper into analyzing fine-grained visual description generation. This research provides valuable insights into the generation quality of LVLMs, enhancing the understanding of multimodal language models. Notably, MiniGPT-4 stands out for its better ability to generate fine-grained descriptions, outperforming the other two models in this aspect. The code is provided at \url{https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Explore_FGVDs-E277}.
Ag2Manip: Learning Novel Manipulation Skills with Agent-Agnostic Visual and Action Representations
Authors: Puhao Li, Tengyu Liu, Yuyang Li, Muzhi Han, Haoran Geng, Shu Wang, Yixin Zhu, Song-Chun Zhu, Siyuan Huang
Date: 2024-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Autonomous robotic systems capable of learning novel manipulation tasks are poised to transform industries from manufacturing to service automation. However, modern methods (e.g., VIP and R3M) still face significant hurdles, notably the domain gap among robotic embodiments and the sparsity of successful task executions within specific action spaces, resulting in misaligned and ambiguous task representations. We introduce Ag2Manip (Agent-Agnostic representations for Manipulation), a framework aimed at surmounting these challenges through two key innovations: a novel agent-agnostic visual representation derived from human manipulation videos, with the specifics of embodiments obscured to enhance generalizability; and an agent-agnostic action representation abstracting a robot's kinematics to a universal agent proxy, emphasizing crucial interactions between end-effector and object. Ag2Manip's empirical validation across simulated benchmarks like FrankaKitchen, ManiSkill, and PartManip shows a 325% increase in performance, achieved without domain-specific demonstrations. Ablation studies underline the essential contributions of the visual and action representations to this success. Extending our evaluations to the real world, Ag2Manip significantly improves imitation learning success rates from 50% to 77.5%, demonstrating its effectiveness and generalizability across both simulated and physical environments.
HYPE: Hyperbolic Entailment Filtering for Underspecified Images and Texts
Authors: Wonjae Kim, Sanghyuk Chun, Taekyung Kim, Dongyoon Han, Sangdoo Yun
Date: 2024-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, Specificity

In an era where the volume of data drives the effectiveness of self-supervised learning, the specificity and clarity of data semantics play a crucial role in model training. Addressing this, we introduce HYPerbolic Entailment filtering (HYPE), a novel methodology designed to meticulously extract modality-wise meaningful and well-aligned data from extensive, noisy image-text pair datasets. Our approach leverages hyperbolic embeddings and the concept of entailment cones to evaluate and filter out samples with meaningless or underspecified semantics, focusing on enhancing the specificity of each data sample. HYPE not only demonstrates a significant improvement in filtering efficiency but also sets a new state-of-the-art in the DataComp benchmark when combined with existing filtering techniques. This breakthrough showcases the potential of HYPE to refine the data selection process, thereby contributing to the development of more accurate and efficient self-supervised learning models. Additionally, the image specificity $\epsilon_{i}$ can be independently applied to induce an image-only dataset from an image-text or image-only data pool for training image-only self-supervised models and showed superior performance when compared to the dataset induced by CLIP score.
Inhomogeneous illumination image enhancement under ex-tremely low visibility condition
Authors: Libang Chen, Jinyan Lin, Qihang Bian, Yikun Liu, Jianying Zhou
Date: 2024-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, object-detection, Object Detection

Imaging through dense fog presents unique challenges, with essential visual information crucial for applications like object detection and recognition obscured, thereby hindering conventional image processing methods. Despite improvements through neural network-based approaches, these techniques falter under extremely low visibility conditions exacerbated by inhomogeneous illumination, which degrades deep learning performance due to inconsistent signal intensities. We introduce in this paper a novel method that adaptively filters background illumination based on Structural Differential and Integral Filtering (SDIF) to enhance only vital signal information. The grayscale banding is eliminated by incorporating a visual optimization strategy based on image gradients. Maximum Histogram Equalization (MHE) is used to achieve high contrast while maintaining fidelity to the original content. We evaluated our algorithm using data collected from both a fog chamber and outdoor environments, and performed comparative analyses with existing methods. Our findings demonstrate that our proposed method significantly enhances signal clarity under extremely low visibility conditions and out-performs existing techniques, offering substantial improvements for deep fog imaging applications.