pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Reproducibility Study of "ITI-GEN: Inclusive Text-to-Image Generation"
Authors: Daniel Gallo Fernández, Răzvan-Andrei Matisan, Alejandro Monroy Muñoz, Janusz Partyka
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Image Generation, Negation, Text to Image Generation, Text-to-Image Generation

Text-to-image generative models often present issues regarding fairness with respect to certain sensitive attributes, such as gender or skin tone. This study aims to reproduce the results presented in "ITI-GEN: Inclusive Text-to-Image Generation" by Zhang et al. (2023a), which introduces a model to improve inclusiveness in these kinds of models. We show that most of the claims made by the authors about ITI-GEN hold: it improves the diversity and quality of generated images, it is scalable to different domains, it has plug-and-play capabilities, and it is efficient from a computational point of view. However, ITI-GEN sometimes uses undesired attributes as proxy features and it is unable to disentangle some pairs of (correlated) attributes such as gender and baldness. In addition, when the number of considered attributes increases, the training time grows exponentially and ITI-GEN struggles to generate inclusive images for all elements in the joint distribution. To solve these issues, we propose using Hard Prompt Search with negative prompting, a method that does not require training and that handles negation better than vanilla Hard Prompt Search. Nonetheless, Hard Prompt Search (with or without negative prompting) cannot be used for continuous attributes that are hard to express in natural language, an area where ITI-GEN excels as it is guided by images during training. Finally, we propose combining ITI-GEN and Hard Prompt Search with negative prompting.
A Study on the Implementation Method of an Agent-Based Advanced RAG System Using Graph
Authors: Cheonsu Jeong
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This study aims to improve knowledge-based question-answering (QA) systems by overcoming the limitations of existing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) models and implementing an advanced RAG system based on Graph technology to develop high-quality generative AI services. While existing RAG models demonstrate high accuracy and fluency by utilizing retrieved information, they may suffer from accuracy degradation as they generate responses using pre-loaded knowledge without reprocessing. Additionally, they cannot incorporate real-time data after the RAG configuration stage, leading to issues with contextual understanding and biased information. To address these limitations, this study implemented an enhanced RAG system utilizing Graph technology. This system is designed to efficiently search and utilize information. Specifically, it employs LangGraph to evaluate the reliability of retrieved information and synthesizes diverse data to generate more accurate and enhanced responses. Furthermore, the study provides a detailed explanation of the system's operation, key implementation steps, and examples through implementation code and validation results, thereby enhancing the understanding of advanced RAG technology. This approach offers practical guidelines for implementing advanced RAG systems in corporate services, making it a valuable resource for practical application.
Mixture of Nested Experts: Adaptive Processing of Visual Tokens
Authors: Gagan Jain, Nidhi Hegde, Aditya Kusupati, Arsha Nagrani, Shyamal Buch, Prateek Jain, Anurag Arnab, Sujoy Paul
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts

The visual medium (images and videos) naturally contains a large amount of information redundancy, thereby providing a great opportunity for leveraging efficiency in processing. While Vision Transformer (ViT) based models scale effectively to large data regimes, they fail to capitalize on this inherent redundancy, leading to higher computational costs. Mixture of Experts (MoE) networks demonstrate scalability while maintaining same inference-time costs, but they come with a larger parameter footprint. We present Mixture of Nested Experts (MoNE), which utilizes a nested structure for experts, wherein individual experts fall on an increasing compute-accuracy curve. Given a compute budget, MoNE learns to dynamically choose tokens in a priority order, and thus redundant tokens are processed through cheaper nested experts. Using this framework, we achieve equivalent performance as the baseline models, while reducing inference time compute by over two-fold. We validate our approach on standard image and video datasets - ImageNet-21K, Kinetics400, and Something-Something-v2. We further highlight MoNE$'$s adaptability by showcasing its ability to maintain strong performance across different inference-time compute budgets on videos, using only a single trained model.
Simply Trainable Nearest Neighbour Machine Translation with GPU Inference
Authors: Hossam Amer, Abdelrahman Abouelenin, Mohamed Maher, Evram Narouz, Mohamed Afify, Hany Awadallah
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, GPU, Machine Translation, Sentence, Translation

Nearest neighbor machine translation is a successful approach for fast domain adaption, which interpolates the pre-trained transformers with domain-specific token-level k-nearest-neighbor (kNN) retrieval without retraining. Despite kNN MT's success, searching large reference corpus and fixed interpolation between the kNN and pre-trained model led to computational complexity and translation quality challenges. Among other papers, Dai et al. proposed methods to obtain a small number of reference samples dynamically for which they introduced a distance-aware interpolation method using an equation that includes free parameters. This paper proposes a simply trainable nearest neighbor machine translation and carry out inference experiments on GPU. Similar to Dai et al., we first adaptively construct a small datastore for each input sentence. Second, we train a single-layer network for the interpolation coefficient between the knnMT and pre-trained result to automatically interpolate in different domains. Experimental results on different domains show that our proposed method either improves or sometimes maintain the translation quality of methods in Dai et al. while being automatic. In addition, our GPU inference results demonstrate that knnMT can be integrated into GPUs with a drop of only 5% in terms of speed.
Can I trust my anomaly detection system? A case study based on explainable AI
Authors: Muhammad Rashid, Elvio Amparore, Enrico Ferrari, Damiano Verda
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection

Generative models based on variational autoencoders are a popular technique for detecting anomalies in images in a semi-supervised context. A common approach employs the anomaly score to detect the presence of anomalies, and it is known to reach high level of accuracy on benchmark datasets. However, since anomaly scores are computed from reconstruction disparities, they often obscure the detection of various spurious features, raising concerns regarding their actual efficacy. This case study explores the robustness of an anomaly detection system based on variational autoencoder generative models through the use of eXplainable AI methods. The goal is to get a different perspective on the real performances of anomaly detectors that use reconstruction differences. In our case study we discovered that, in many cases, samples are detected as anomalous for the wrong or misleading factors.
Robust Conformal Volume Estimation in 3D Medical Images
Authors: Benjamin Lambert, Florence Forbes, Senan Doyle, Michel Dojat
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Conformal Prediction, Density Ratio Estimation, Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation, Uncertainty Quantification

Volumetry is one of the principal downstream applications of 3D medical image segmentation, for example, to detect abnormal tissue growth or for surgery planning. Conformal Prediction is a promising framework for uncertainty quantification, providing calibrated predictive intervals associated with automatic volume measurements. However, this methodology is based on the hypothesis that calibration and test samples are exchangeable, an assumption that is in practice often violated in medical image applications. A weighted formulation of Conformal Prediction can be framed to mitigate this issue, but its empirical investigation in the medical domain is still lacking. A potential reason is that it relies on the estimation of the density ratio between the calibration and test distributions, which is likely to be intractable in scenarios involving high-dimensional data. To circumvent this, we propose an efficient approach for density ratio estimation relying on the compressed latent representations generated by the segmentation model. Our experiments demonstrate the efficiency of our approach to reduce the coverage error in the presence of covariate shifts, in both synthetic and real-world settings. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/benolmbrt/wcp_miccai
AOTree: Aspect Order Tree-based Model for Explainable Recommendation
Authors: Wenxin Zhao, Peng Zhang, Hansu Gu, Dongsheng Li, Tun Lu, Ning Gu
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Explainable Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

Recent recommender systems aim to provide not only accurate recommendations but also explanations that help users understand them better. However, most existing explainable recommendations only consider the importance of content in reviews, such as words or aspects, and ignore the ordering relationship among them. This oversight neglects crucial ordering dimensions in the human decision-making process, leading to suboptimal performance. Therefore, in this paper, we propose Aspect Order Tree-based (AOTree) explainable recommendation method, inspired by the Order Effects Theory from cognitive and decision psychology, in order to capture the dependency relationships among decisive factors. We first validate the theory in the recommendation scenario by analyzing the reviews of the users. Then, according to the theory, the proposed AOTree expands the construction of the decision tree to capture aspect orders in users' decision-making processes, and use attention mechanisms to make predictions based on the aspect orders. Extensive experiments demonstrate our method's effectiveness on rating predictions, and our approach aligns more consistently with the user' s decision-making process by displaying explanations in a particular order, thereby enhancing interpretability.
Monetizing Currency Pair Sentiments through LLM Explainability
Authors: Lior Limonad, Fabiana Fournier, Juan Manuel Vera Díaz, Inna Skarbovsky, Shlomit Gur, Raquel Lazcano
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Sentiment Analysis

Large language models (LLMs) play a vital role in almost every domain in today's organizations. In the context of this work, we highlight the use of LLMs for sentiment analysis (SA) and explainability. Specifically, we contribute a novel technique to leverage LLMs as a post-hoc model-independent tool for the explainability of SA. We applied our technique in the financial domain for currency-pair price predictions using open news feed data merged with market prices. Our application shows that the developed technique is not only a viable alternative to using conventional eXplainable AI but can also be fed back to enrich the input to the machine learning (ML) model to better predict future currency-pair values. We envision our results could be generalized to employing explainability as a conventional enrichment for ML input for better ML predictions in general.
Efficient Shield Synthesis via State-Space Transformation
Authors: Asger Horn Brorholt, Andreas Holck Høeg-Petersen, Kim Guldstrand Larsen, Christian Schilling
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00

We consider the problem of synthesizing safety strategies for control systems, also known as shields. Since the state space is infinite, shields are typically computed over a finite-state abstraction, with the most common abstraction being a rectangular grid. However, for many systems, such a grid does not align well with the safety property or the system dynamics. That is why a coarse grid is rarely sufficient, but a fine grid is typically computationally infeasible to obtain. In this paper, we show that appropriate state-space transformations can still allow to use a coarse grid at almost no computational overhead. We demonstrate in three case studies that our transformation-based synthesis outperforms a standard synthesis by several orders of magnitude. In the first two case studies, we use domain knowledge to select a suitable transformation. In the third case study, we instead report on results in engineering a transformation without domain knowledge.
Reverse Map Projections as Equivariant Quantum Embeddings
Authors: Max Arnott, Dimitri Papaioannou, Kieran McDowall, Phalgun Lolur, Bambordé Baldé
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantum Machine Learning

We introduce the novel class $(E_\alpha)_{\alpha \in [-\infty,1)}$ of reverse map projection embeddings, each one defining a unique new method of encoding classical data into quantum states. Inspired by well-known map projections from the unit sphere onto its tangent planes, used in practice in cartography, these embeddings address the common drawback of the amplitude embedding method, wherein scalar multiples of data points are identified and information about the norm of data is lost. We show how reverse map projections can be utilised as equivariant embeddings for quantum machine learning. Using these methods, we can leverage symmetries in classical datasets to significantly strengthen performance on quantum machine learning tasks. Finally, we select four values of $\alpha$ with which to perform a simple classification task, taking $E_\alpha$ as the embedding and experimenting with both equivariant and non-equivariant setups. We compare their results alongside those of standard amplitude embedding.
Practical and Reproducible Symbolic Music Generation by Large Language Models with Structural Embeddings
Authors: Seungyeon Rhyu, Kichang Yang, Sungjun Cho, Jaehyeon Kim, Kyogu Lee, Moontae Lee
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation

Music generation introduces challenging complexities to large language models. Symbolic structures of music often include vertical harmonization as well as horizontal counterpoint, urging various adaptations and enhancements for large-scale Transformers. However, existing works share three major drawbacks: 1) their tokenization requires domain-specific annotations, such as bars and beats, that are typically missing in raw MIDI data; 2) the pure impact of enhancing token embedding methods is hardly examined without domain-specific annotations; and 3) existing works to overcome the aforementioned drawbacks, such as MuseNet, lack reproducibility. To tackle such limitations, we develop a MIDI-based music generation framework inspired by MuseNet, empirically studying two structural embeddings that do not rely on domain-specific annotations. We provide various metrics and insights that can guide suitable encoding to deploy. We also verify that multiple embedding configurations can selectively boost certain musical aspects. By providing open-source implementations via HuggingFace, our findings shed light on leveraging large language models toward practical and reproducible music generation.
BEExAI: Benchmark to Evaluate Explainable AI
Authors: Samuel Sithakoul, Sara Meftah, Clément Feutry
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00

Recent research in explainability has given rise to numerous post-hoc attribution methods aimed at enhancing our comprehension of the outputs of black-box machine learning models. However, evaluating the quality of explanations lacks a cohesive approach and a consensus on the methodology for deriving quantitative metrics that gauge the efficacy of explainability post-hoc attribution methods. Furthermore, with the development of increasingly complex deep learning models for diverse data applications, the need for a reliable way of measuring the quality and correctness of explanations is becoming critical. We address this by proposing BEExAI, a benchmark tool that allows large-scale comparison of different post-hoc XAI methods, employing a set of selected evaluation metrics.
Leveraging Foundation Models for Zero-Shot IoT Sensing
Authors: Dinghao Xue, Xiaoran Fan, Tao Chen, Guohao Lan, Qun Song
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Generalized Zero-Shot Learning, Zero-Shot Learning

Deep learning models are increasingly deployed on edge Internet of Things (IoT) devices. However, these models typically operate under supervised conditions and fail to recognize unseen classes different from training. To address this, zero-shot learning (ZSL) aims to classify data of unseen classes with the help of semantic information. Foundation models (FMs) trained on web-scale data have shown impressive ZSL capability in natural language processing and visual understanding. However, leveraging FMs' generalized knowledge for zero-shot IoT sensing using signals such as mmWave, IMU, and Wi-Fi has not been fully investigated. In this work, we align the IoT data embeddings with the semantic embeddings generated by an FM's text encoder for zero-shot IoT sensing. To utilize the physics principles governing the generation of IoT sensor signals to derive more effective prompts for semantic embedding extraction, we propose to use cross-attention to combine a learnable soft prompt that is optimized automatically on training data and an auxiliary hard prompt that encodes domain knowledge of the IoT sensing task. To address the problem of IoT embeddings biasing to seen classes due to the lack of unseen class data during training, we propose using data augmentation to synthesize unseen class IoT data for fine-tuning the IoT feature extractor and embedding projector. We evaluate our approach on multiple IoT sensing tasks. Results show that our approach achieves superior open-set detection and generalized zero-shot learning performance compared with various baselines. Our code is available at https://github.com/schrodingho/FM\_ZSL\_IoT.
Yucca: A Deep Learning Framework For Medical Image Analysis
Authors: Sebastian Nørgaard Llambias, Julia Machnio, Asbjørn Munk, Jakob Ambsdorf, Mads Nielsen, Mostafa Mehdipour Ghazi
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Hippocampus, Medical Image Analysis, Segmentation

Medical image analysis using deep learning frameworks has advanced healthcare by automating complex tasks, but many existing frameworks lack flexibility, modularity, and user-friendliness. To address these challenges, we introduce Yucca, an open-source AI framework available at https://github.com/Sllambias/yucca, designed specifically for medical imaging applications and built on PyTorch and PyTorch Lightning. Yucca features a three-tiered architecture: Functional, Modules, and Pipeline, providing a comprehensive and customizable solution. Evaluated across diverse tasks such as cerebral microbleeds detection, white matter hyperintensity segmentation, and hippocampus segmentation, Yucca achieves state-of-the-art results, demonstrating its robustness and versatility. Yucca offers a powerful, flexible, and user-friendly platform for medical image analysis, inviting community contributions to advance its capabilities and impact.
A Unified Graph Transformer for Overcoming Isolations in Multi-modal Recommendation
Authors: Zixuan Yi, Iadh Ounis
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Multi-modal Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

With the rapid development of online multimedia services, especially in e-commerce platforms, there is a pressing need for personalised recommendation systems that can effectively encode the diverse multi-modal content associated with each item. However, we argue that existing multi-modal recommender systems typically use isolated processes for both feature extraction and modality modelling. Such isolated processes can harm the recommendation performance. Firstly, an isolated extraction process underestimates the importance of effective feature extraction in multi-modal recommendations, potentially incorporating non-relevant information, which is harmful to item representations. Second, an isolated modality modelling process produces disjointed embeddings for item modalities due to the individual processing of each modality, which leads to a suboptimal fusion of user/item representations for effective user preferences prediction. We hypothesise that the use of a unified model for addressing both aforementioned isolated processes will enable the consistent extraction and cohesive fusion of joint multi-modal features, thereby enhancing the effectiveness of multi-modal recommender systems. In this paper, we propose a novel model, called Unified Multi-modal Graph Transformer (UGT), which firstly leverages a multi-way transformer to extract aligned multi-modal features from raw data for top-k recommendation. Subsequently, we build a unified graph neural network in our UGT model to jointly fuse the user/item representations with their corresponding multi-modal features. Using the graph transformer architecture of our UGT model, we show that the UGT model can achieve significant effectiveness gains, especially when jointly optimised with the commonly-used multi-modal recommendation losses.
Distances Between Partial Preference Orderings
Authors: Jean Dezert, Andrii Shekhovtsov, Wojciech Salabun
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00

This paper proposes to establish the distance between partial preference orderings based on two very different approaches. The first approach corresponds to the brute force method based on combinatorics. It generates all possible complete preference orderings compatible with the partial preference orderings and calculates the Frobenius distance between all fully compatible preference orderings. Unfortunately, this first method is not very efficient in solving high-dimensional problems because of its big combinatorial complexity. That is why we propose to circumvent this problem by using a second approach based on belief functions, which can adequately model the missing information of partial preference orderings. This second approach to the calculation of distance does not suffer from combinatorial complexity limitation. We show through simple examples how these two theoretical methods work.
Imitation Learning for Intra-Day Power Grid Operation through Topology Actions
Authors: Matthijs de Jong, Jan Viebahn, Yuliya Shapovalova
Date: 2024-07-29 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Power grid operation is becoming increasingly complex due to the increase in generation of renewable energy. The recent series of Learning To Run a Power Network (L2RPN) competitions have encouraged the use of artificial agents to assist human dispatchers in operating power grids. In this paper we study the performance of imitation learning for day-ahead power grid operation through topology actions. In particular, we consider two rule-based expert agents: a greedy agent and a N-1 agent. While the latter is more computationally expensive since it takes N-1 safety considerations into account, it exhibits a much higher operational performance. We train a fully-connected neural network (FCNN) on expert state-action pairs and evaluate it in two ways. First, we find that classification accuracy is limited despite extensive hyperparameter tuning, due to class imbalance and class overlap. Second, as a power system agent, the FCNN performs only slightly worse than expert agents. Furthermore, hybrid agents, which incorporate minimal additional simulations, match expert agents' performance with significantly lower computational cost. Consequently, imitation learning shows promise for developing fast, high-performing power grid agents, motivating its further exploration in future L2RPN studies.