pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Order Matters: Exploring Order Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models
Authors: Zhijie Tan, Xu Chu, Weiping Li, Tong Mo
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Question Answering, Sensitivity, Visual Question Answering

Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) utilize multimodal contexts consisting of text, images, or videos to solve various multimodal tasks. However, we find that changing the order of multimodal input can cause the model's performance to fluctuate between advanced performance and random guessing. This phenomenon exists in both single-modality (text-only or image-only) and mixed-modality (image-text-pair) contexts. Furthermore, we demonstrate that popular MLLMs pay special attention to certain multimodal context positions, particularly the beginning and end. Leveraging this special attention, we place key video frames and important image/text content in special positions within the context and submit them to the MLLM for inference. This method results in average performance gains of 14.7% for video-caption matching and 17.8% for visual question answering tasks. Additionally, we propose a new metric, Position-Invariant Accuracy (PIA), to address order bias in MLLM evaluation. Our research findings contribute to a better understanding of Multi-Modal In-Context Learning (MMICL) and provide practical strategies for enhancing MLLM performance without increasing computational costs.
Learning Mathematical Rules with Large Language Models
Authors: Antoine Gorceix, Bastien Le Chenadec, Ahmad Rammal, Nelson Vadori, Manuela Veloso
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00

In this paper, we study the ability of large language models to learn specific mathematical rules such as distributivity or simplifying equations. We present an empirical analysis of their ability to generalize these rules, as well as to reuse them in the context of word problems. For this purpose, we provide a rigorous methodology to build synthetic data incorporating such rules, and perform fine-tuning of large language models on such data. Our experiments show that our model can learn and generalize these rules to some extent, as well as suitably reuse them in the context of word problems.
Breaking ReAct Agents: Foot-in-the-Door Attack Will Get You In
Authors: Itay Nakash, George Kour, Guy Uziel, Ateret Anaby-Tavor
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00

Following the advancement of large language models (LLMs), the development of LLM-based autonomous agents has become increasingly prevalent. As a result, the need to understand the security vulnerabilities of these agents has become a critical task. We examine how ReAct agents can be exploited using a straightforward yet effective method we refer to as the foot-in-the-door attack. Our experiments show that indirect prompt injection attacks, prompted by harmless and unrelated requests (such as basic calculations) can significantly increase the likelihood of the agent performing subsequent malicious actions. Our results show that once a ReAct agents thought includes a specific tool or action, the likelihood of executing this tool in the subsequent steps increases significantly, as the agent seldom re-evaluates its actions. Consequently, even random, harmless requests can establish a foot-in-the-door, allowing an attacker to embed malicious instructions into the agents thought process, making it more susceptible to harmful directives. To mitigate this vulnerability, we propose implementing a simple reflection mechanism that prompts the agent to reassess the safety of its actions during execution, which can help reduce the success of such attacks.
IdenBAT: Disentangled Representation Learning for Identity-Preserved Brain Age Transformation
Authors: Junyeong Maeng, Kwanseok Oh, Wonsik Jung, Heung-Il Suk
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Representation Learning

Brain age transformation aims to convert reference brain images into synthesized images that accurately reflect the age-specific features of a target age group. The primary objective of this task is to modify only the age-related attributes of the reference image while preserving all other age-irrelevant attributes. However, achieving this goal poses substantial challenges due to the inherent entanglement of various image attributes within features extracted from a backbone encoder, resulting in simultaneous alterations during the image generation. To address this challenge, we propose a novel architecture that employs disentangled representation learning for identity-preserved brain age transformation called IdenBAT. This approach facilitates the decomposition of image features, ensuring the preservation of individual traits while selectively transforming age-related characteristics to match those of the target age group. Through comprehensive experiments conducted on both 2D and full-size 3D brain datasets, our method adeptly converts input images to target age while retaining individual characteristics accurately. Furthermore, our approach demonstrates superiority over existing state-of-the-art regarding performance fidelity.
Math Neurosurgery: Isolating Language Models' Math Reasoning Abilities Using Only Forward Passes
Authors: Bryan R. Christ, Zack Gottesman, Jonathan Kropko, Thomas Hartvigsen
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Math

Math reasoning is a highly active area of Large Language Model (LLM) research because it is a hallmark of artificial intelligence. However, few works have explored how math reasoning is encoded within LLM parameters and if it is a skill that can be isolated within a model. Doing so could allow targeted intervention to improve math performance without altering non-math behavior and foster understanding of how models encode math reasoning. We introduce Math Neurosurgery (MathNeuro), a method for isolating math-specific parameters in LLMs using only forward passes. MathNeuro builds on existing work by using weights and activations to calculate parameter importance, but isolates math-specific parameters by removing those important for general language tasks. Pruning parameters MathNeuro identifies deletes a LLM's math reasoning ability without destroying its general language ability. Scaling these parameters by a small constant improves a pretrained or instruction-tuned LLM's performance by 4-17% on GSM8K while leaving non-math behavior unaltered. MathNeuro is also data efficient: most of its effectiveness holds when identifying math-specific parameters using a single sample. MathNeuro highlights the potential for future work to intervene on math-specific parameters.
Revealing Hidden Bias in AI: Lessons from Large Language Models
Authors: Django Beatty, Kritsada Masanthia, Teepakorn Kaphol, Niphan Sethi
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

As large language models (LLMs) become integral to recruitment processes, concerns about AI-induced bias have intensified. This study examines biases in candidate interview reports generated by Claude 3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5, and Llama 3.1 405B, focusing on characteristics such as gender, race, and age. We evaluate the effectiveness of LLM-based anonymization in reducing these biases. Findings indicate that while anonymization reduces certain biases, particularly gender bias, the degree of effectiveness varies across models and bias types. Notably, Llama 3.1 405B exhibited the lowest overall bias. Moreover, our methodology of comparing anonymized and non-anonymized data reveals a novel approach to assessing inherent biases in LLMs beyond recruitment applications. This study underscores the importance of careful LLM selection and suggests best practices for minimizing bias in AI applications, promoting fairness and inclusivity.
SleepCoT: A Lightweight Personalized Sleep Health Model via Chain-of-Thought Distillation
Authors: huimin zheng, Xiaofeng Xing, Xiangmin Xu
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

We present a novel approach to personalized sleep health management using few-shot Chain-of-Thought (CoT) distillation, enabling small-scale language models (> 2B parameters) to rival the performance of large language models (LLMs) in specialized health domains. Our method simultaneously distills problem-solving strategies, long-tail expert knowledge, and personalized recommendation capabilities from larger models into more efficient, compact models. Unlike existing systems, our approach offers three key functionalities: generating personalized sleep health recommendations, supporting user-specific follow-up inquiries, and providing responses to domain-specific knowledge questions. We focus on sleep health due to its measurability via wearable devices and its impact on overall well-being. Our experimental setup, involving GPT-4o for data synthesis, Qwen-max for instruction set creation, and Qwen2.5 1.5B for model distillation, demonstrates significant improvements over baseline small-scale models in penalization, reasoning, and knowledge application. Experiments using 100 simulated sleep reports and 1,000 domain-specific questions shows our model achieves comparable performance to larger models while maintaining efficiency for real-world deployment. This research not only advances AI-driven health management but also provides a novel approach to leveraging LLM capabilities in resource-constrained environments, potentially enhancing the accessibility of personalized healthcare solutions.
EnvBridge: Bridging Diverse Environments with Cross-Environment Knowledge Transfer for Embodied AI
Authors: Tomoyuki Kagaya, Yuxuan Lou, Thong Jing Yuan, Subramanian Lakshmi, Jayashree Karlekar, Sugiri Pranata, Natsuki Murakami, Akira Kinose, Koki Oguri, Felix Wick, Yang You
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated high reasoning capabilities, drawing attention for their applications as agents in various decision-making processes. One notably promising application of LLM agents is robotic manipulation. Recent research has shown that LLMs can generate text planning or control code for robots, providing substantial flexibility and interaction capabilities. However, these methods still face challenges in terms of flexibility and applicability across different environments, limiting their ability to adapt autonomously. Current approaches typically fall into two categories: those relying on environment-specific policy training, which restricts their transferability, and those generating code actions based on fixed prompts, which leads to diminished performance when confronted with new environments. These limitations significantly constrain the generalizability of agents in robotic manipulation. To address these limitations, we propose a novel method called EnvBridge. This approach involves the retention and transfer of successful robot control codes from source environments to target environments. EnvBridge enhances the agent's adaptability and performance across diverse settings by leveraging insights from multiple environments. Notably, our approach alleviates environmental constraints, offering a more flexible and generalizable solution for robotic manipulation tasks. We validated the effectiveness of our method using robotic manipulation benchmarks: RLBench, MetaWorld, and CALVIN. Our experiments demonstrate that LLM agents can successfully leverage diverse knowledge sources to solve complex tasks. Consequently, our approach significantly enhances the adaptability and robustness of robotic manipulation agents in planning across diverse environments.
Mitigating Vanishing Activations in Deep CapsNets Using Channel Pruning
Authors: Siddharth Sahu, Abdulrahman Altahhan
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00

Capsule Networks outperform Convolutional Neural Networks in learning the part-whole relationships with viewpoint invariance, and the credit goes to their multidimensional capsules. It was assumed that increasing the number of capsule layers in the capsule networks would enhance the model performance. However, recent studies found that Capsule Networks lack scalability due to vanishing activations in the capsules of deeper layers. This paper thoroughly investigates the vanishing activation problem in deep Capsule Networks. To analyze this issue and understand how increasing capsule dimensions can facilitate deeper networks, various Capsule Network models are constructed and evaluated with different numbers of capsules, capsule dimensions, and intermediate layers for this paper. Unlike traditional model pruning, which reduces the number of model parameters and expedites model training, this study uses pruning to mitigate the vanishing activations in the deeper capsule layers. In addition, the backbone network and capsule layers are pruned with different pruning ratios to reduce the number of inactive capsules and achieve better model accuracy than the unpruned models.
SaVe-TAG: Semantic-aware Vicinal Risk Minimization for Long-Tailed Text-Attributed Graphs
Authors: Leyao Wang, Yu Wang, Bo Ni, Yuying Zhao, Hanyu Wang, Yao Ma, Tyler Derr
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Data Augmentation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Node Classification, TAG

Real-world graph data often follows long-tailed distributions, making it difficult for Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) to generalize well across both head and tail classes. Recent advances in Vicinal Risk Minimization (VRM) have shown promise in mitigating class imbalance with numeric interpolation; however, existing approaches largely rely on embedding-space arithmetic, which fails to capture the rich semantics inherent in text-attributed graphs. In this work, we propose our method, SaVe-TAG (Semantic-aware Vicinal Risk Minimization for Long-Tailed Text-Attributed Graphs), a novel VRM framework that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to perform text-level interpolation, generating on-manifold, boundary-enriching synthetic samples for minority classes. To mitigate the risk of noisy generation, we introduce a confidence-based edge assignment mechanism that uses graph topology as a natural filter to ensure structural consistency. We provide theoretical justification for our method and conduct extensive experiments on benchmark datasets, showing that our approach consistently outperforms both numeric interpolation and prior long-tailed node classification baselines. Our results highlight the importance of integrating semantic and structural signals for balanced and effective learning on text-attributed graphs.
Contrasting Attitudes Towards Current and Future AI Applications for Computerised Interpretation of ECG: A Clinical Stakeholder Interview Study
Authors: Lukas Hughes-Noehrer, Leda Channer, Gabriel Strain, Gregory Yates, Richard Body, Caroline Jay
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Objectives: To investigate clinicians' attitudes towards current automated interpretation of ECG and novel AI technologies and their perception of computer-assisted interpretation. Materials and Methods: We conducted a series of interviews with clinicians in the UK. Our study: (i) explores the potential for AI, specifically future 'human-like' computing approaches, to facilitate ECG interpretation and support clinical decision making, and (ii) elicits their opinions about the importance of explainability and trustworthiness of AI algorithms. Results: We performed inductive thematic analysis on interview transcriptions from 23 clinicians and identified the following themes: (i) a lack of trust in current systems, (ii) positive attitudes towards future AI applications and requirements for these, (iii) the relationship between the accuracy and explainability of algorithms, and (iv) opinions on education, possible deskilling, and the impact of AI on clinical competencies. Discussion: Clinicians do not trust current computerised methods, but welcome future 'AI' technologies. Where clinicians trust future AI interpretation to be accurate, they are less concerned that it is explainable. They also preferred ECG interpretation that demonstrated the results of the algorithm visually. Whilst clinicians do not fear job losses, they are concerned about deskilling and the need to educate the workforce to use AI responsibly. Conclusion: Clinicians are positive about the future application of AI in clinical decision-making. Accuracy is a key factor of uptake and visualisations are preferred over current computerised methods. This is viewed as a potential means of training and upskilling, in contrast to the deskilling that automation might be perceived to bring.
Pedestrian motion prediction evaluation for urban autonomous driving
Authors: Dmytro Zabolotnii, Yar Muhammad, Naveed Muhammad
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, motion prediction, Prediction

Pedestrian motion prediction is a key part of the modular-based autonomous driving pipeline, ensuring safe, accurate, and timely awareness of human agents' possible future trajectories. The autonomous vehicle can use this information to prevent any possible accidents and create a comfortable and pleasant driving experience for the passengers and pedestrians. A wealth of research was done on the topic from the authors of robotics, computer vision, intelligent transportation systems, and other fields. However, a relatively unexplored angle is the integration of the state-of-art solutions into existing autonomous driving stacks and evaluating them in real-life conditions rather than sanitized datasets. We analyze selected publications with provided open-source solutions and provide a perspective obtained by integrating them into existing Autonomous Driving framework - Autoware Mini and performing experiments in natural urban conditions in Tartu, Estonia to determine valuability of traditional motion prediction metrics. This perspective should be valuable to any potential autonomous driving or robotics engineer looking for the real-world performance of the existing state-of-art pedestrian motion prediction problem. The code with instructions on accessing the dataset is available at https://github.com/dmytrozabolotnii/autoware_mini.
Fast Graph Sharpness-Aware Minimization for Enhancing and Accelerating Few-Shot Node Classification
Authors: Yihong Luo, Yuhan Chen, Siya Qiu, Yiwei Wang, Chen Zhang, Yan Zhou, Xiaochun Cao, Jing Tang
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Node Classification

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have shown superior performance in node classification. However, GNNs perform poorly in the Few-Shot Node Classification (FSNC) task that requires robust generalization to make accurate predictions for unseen classes with limited labels. To tackle the challenge, we propose the integration of Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM)--a technique designed to enhance model generalization by finding a flat minimum of the loss landscape--into GNN training. The standard SAM approach, however, consists of two forward-backward steps in each training iteration, doubling the computational cost compared to the base optimizer (e.g., Adam). To mitigate this drawback, we introduce a novel algorithm, Fast Graph Sharpness-Aware Minimization (FGSAM), that integrates the rapid training of Multi-Layer Perceptrons (MLPs) with the superior performance of GNNs. Specifically, we utilize GNNs for parameter perturbation while employing MLPs to minimize the perturbed loss so that we can find a flat minimum with good generalization more efficiently. Moreover, our method reutilizes the gradient from the perturbation phase to incorporate graph topology into the minimization process at almost zero additional cost. To further enhance training efficiency, we develop FGSAM+ that executes exact perturbations periodically. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed algorithm outperforms the standard SAM with lower computational costs in FSNC tasks. In particular, our FGSAM+ as a SAM variant offers a faster optimization than the base optimizer in most cases. In addition to FSNC, our proposed methods also demonstrate competitive performance in the standard node classification task for heterophilic graphs, highlighting the broad applicability. The code is available at https://github.com/draym28/FGSAM_NeurIPS24.
Assessment of Transformer-Based Encoder-Decoder Model for Human-Like Summarization
Authors: Sindhu Nair, Y. S. Rao, Radha Shankarmani
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstractive Text Summarization, Articles, Decoder, Domain Adaptation, Text Summarization

In recent times, extracting valuable information from large text is making significant progress. Especially in the current era of social media, people expect quick bites of information. Automatic text summarization seeks to tackle this by slimming large texts down into more manageable summaries. This important research area can aid in decision-making by digging out salient content from large text. With the progress in deep learning models, significant work in language models has emerged. The encoder-decoder framework in deep learning has become the central approach for automatic text summarization. This work leverages transformer-based BART model for human-like summarization which is an open-ended problem with many challenges. On training and fine-tuning the encoder-decoder model, it is tested with diverse sample articles and the quality of summaries of diverse samples is assessed based on human evaluation parameters. Further, the finetuned model performance is compared with the baseline pretrained model based on evaluation metrics like ROUGE score and BERTScore. Additionally, domain adaptation of the model is required for improved performance of abstractive summarization of dialogues between interlocutors. On investigating, the above popular evaluation metrics are found to be insensitive to factual errors. Further investigation of the summaries generated by finetuned model is done using the contemporary evaluation metrics of factual consistency like WeCheck and SummaC. Empirical results on BBC News articles highlight that the gold standard summaries written by humans are more factually consistent by 17% than the abstractive summaries generated by finetuned model.
PerspectiveNet: Multi-View Perception for Dynamic Scene Understanding
Authors: Vinh Nguyen
Date: 2024-10-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Scene Understanding, Text Generation

Generating detailed descriptions from multiple cameras and viewpoints is challenging due to the complex and inconsistent nature of visual data. In this paper, we introduce PerspectiveNet, a lightweight yet efficient model for generating long descriptions across multiple camera views. Our approach utilizes a vision encoder, a compact connector module to convert visual features into a fixed-size tensor, and large language models (LLMs) to harness the strong natural language generation capabilities of LLMs. The connector module is designed with three main goals: mapping visual features onto LLM embeddings, emphasizing key information needed for description generation, and producing a fixed-size feature matrix. Additionally, we augment our solution with a secondary task, the correct frame sequence detection, enabling the model to search for the correct sequence of frames to generate descriptions. Finally, we integrate the connector module, the secondary task, the LLM, and a visual feature extraction model into a single architecture, which is trained for the Traffic Safety Description and Analysis task. This task requires generating detailed, fine-grained descriptions of events from multiple cameras and viewpoints. The resulting model is lightweight, ensuring efficient training and inference, while remaining highly effective.