pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Learning and Leveraging World Models in Visual Representation Learning
Authors: Quentin Garrido, Mahmoud Assran, Nicolas Ballas, Adrien Bardes, Laurent Najman, Yann Lecun
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture (JEPA) has emerged as a promising self-supervised approach that learns by leveraging a world model. While previously limited to predicting missing parts of an input, we explore how to generalize the JEPA prediction task to a broader set of corruptions. We introduce Image World Models, an approach that goes beyond masked image modeling and learns to predict the effect of global photometric transformations in latent space. We study the recipe of learning performant IWMs and show that it relies on three key aspects: conditioning, prediction difficulty, and capacity. Additionally, we show that the predictive world model learned by IWM can be adapted through finetuning to solve diverse tasks; a fine-tuned IWM world model matches or surpasses the performance of previous self-supervised methods. Finally, we show that learning with an IWM allows one to control the abstraction level of the learned representations, learning invariant representations such as contrastive methods, or equivariant representations such as masked image modelling.
A Regularization-based Transfer Learning Method for Information Extraction via Instructed Graph Decoder
Authors: Kedi Chen, Jie zhou, Qin Chen, Shunyu Liu, Liang He
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Transfer Learning

Information extraction (IE) aims to extract complex structured information from the text. Numerous datasets have been constructed for various IE tasks, leading to time-consuming and labor-intensive data annotations. Nevertheless, most prevailing methods focus on training task-specific models, while the common knowledge among different IE tasks is not explicitly modeled. Moreover, the same phrase may have inconsistent labels in different tasks, which poses a big challenge for knowledge transfer using a unified model. In this study, we propose a regularization-based transfer learning method for IE (TIE) via an instructed graph decoder. Specifically, we first construct an instruction pool for datasets from all well-known IE tasks, and then present an instructed graph decoder, which decodes various complex structures into a graph uniformly based on corresponding instructions. In this way, the common knowledge shared with existing datasets can be learned and transferred to a new dataset with new labels. Furthermore, to alleviate the label inconsistency problem among various IE tasks, we introduce a task-specific regularization strategy, which does not update the gradients of two tasks with 'opposite direction'. We conduct extensive experiments on 12 datasets spanning four IE tasks, and the results demonstrate the great advantages of our proposed method
Improving Android Malware Detection Through Data Augmentation Using Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Networks
Authors: Kawana Stalin, Mikias Berhanu Mekoya
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Android Malware Detection, Data Augmentation, Generative Adversarial Network, Malware Detection

Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) have demonstrated their versatility across various applications, including data augmentation and malware detection. This research explores the effectiveness of utilizing GAN-generated data to train a model for the detection of Android malware. Given the considerable storage requirements of Android applications, the study proposes a method to synthetically represent data using GANs, thereby reducing storage demands. The proposed methodology involves creating image representations of features extracted from an existing dataset. A GAN model is then employed to generate a more extensive dataset consisting of realistic synthetic grayscale images. Subsequently, this synthetic dataset is utilized to train a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) designed to identify previously unseen Android malware applications. The study includes a comparative analysis of the CNN's performance when trained on real images versus synthetic images generated by the GAN. Furthermore, the research explores variations in performance between the Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network (WGAN) and the Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network (DCGAN). The investigation extends to studying the impact of image size and malware obfuscation on the classification model's effectiveness. The data augmentation approach implemented in this study resulted in a notable performance enhancement of the classification model, ranging from 1.5% to 7%, depending on the dataset. The highest achieved F1 score reached 0.975. Keywords--Generative Adversarial Networks, Android Malware, Data Augmentation, Wasserstein Generative Adversarial Network
SEGAA: A Unified Approach to Predicting Age, Gender, and Emotion in Speech
Authors: Aron R, Indra Sigicharla, Chirag Periwal, Mohanaprasad K, Nithya Darisini P S, Sourabh Tiwari, Shivani Arora
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Speech Emotion Recognition

The interpretation of human voices holds importance across various applications. This study ventures into predicting age, gender, and emotion from vocal cues, a field with vast applications. Voice analysis tech advancements span domains, from improving customer interactions to enhancing healthcare and retail experiences. Discerning emotions aids mental health, while age and gender detection are vital in various contexts. Exploring deep learning models for these predictions involves comparing single, multi-output, and sequential models highlighted in this paper. Sourcing suitable data posed challenges, resulting in the amalgamation of the CREMA-D and EMO-DB datasets. Prior work showed promise in individual predictions, but limited research considered all three variables simultaneously. This paper identifies flaws in an individual model approach and advocates for our novel multi-output learning architecture Speech-based Emotion Gender and Age Analysis (SEGAA) model. The experiments suggest that Multi-output models perform comparably to individual models, efficiently capturing the intricate relationships between variables and speech inputs, all while achieving improved runtime.
Parallel Hyperparameter Optimization Of Spiking Neural Network
Authors: Thomas Firmin, Pierre Boulet, El-Ghazali Talbi
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Optimization, GPU, Hyperparameter Optimization, Neural Architecture Search

Spiking Neural Networks (SNN). SNNs are based on a more biologically inspired approach than usual artificial neural networks. Such models are characterized by complex dynamics between neurons and spikes. These are very sensitive to the hyperparameters, making their optimization challenging. To tackle hyperparameter optimization of SNNs, we initially extended the signal loss issue of SNNs to what we call silent networks. These networks fail to emit enough spikes at their outputs due to mistuned hyperparameters or architecture. Generally, search spaces are heavily restrained, sometimes even discretized, to prevent the sampling of such networks. By defining an early stopping criterion detecting silent networks and by designing specific constraints, we were able to instantiate larger and more flexible search spaces. We applied a constrained Bayesian optimization technique, which was asynchronously parallelized, as the evaluation time of a SNN is highly stochastic. Large-scale experiments were carried-out on a multi-GPU Petascale architecture. By leveraging silent networks, results show an acceleration of the search, while maintaining good performances of both the optimization algorithm and the best solution obtained. We were able to apply our methodology to two popular training algorithms, known as spike timing dependent plasticity and surrogate gradient. Early detection allowed us to prevent worthless and costly computation, directing the search toward promising hyperparameter combinations. Our methodology could be applied to multi-objective problems, where the spiking activity is often minimized to reduce the energy consumption. In this scenario, it becomes essential to find the delicate frontier between low-spiking and silent networks. Finally, our approach may have implications for neural architecture search, particularly in defining suitable spiking architectures.
Authors' Values and Attitudes Towards AI-bridged Scalable Personalization of Creative Language Arts
Authors: Taewook Kim, Hyomin Han, Eytan Adar, Matthew Kay, John Joon Young Chung
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00

Generative AI has the potential to create a new form of interactive media: AI-bridged creative language arts (CLA), which bridge the author and audience by personalizing the author's vision to the audience's context and taste at scale. However, it is unclear what the authors' values and attitudes would be regarding AI-bridged CLA. To identify these values and attitudes, we conducted an interview study with 18 authors across eight genres (e.g., poetry, comics) by presenting speculative but realistic AI-bridged CLA scenarios. We identified three benefits derived from the dynamics between author, artifact, and audience: those that 1) authors get from the process, 2) audiences get from the artifact, and 3) authors get from the audience. We found how AI-bridged CLA would either promote or reduce these benefits, along with authors' concerns. We hope our investigation hints at how AI can provide intriguing experiences to CLA audiences while promoting authors' values.
LoMOE: Localized Multi-Object Editing via Multi-Diffusion
Authors: Goirik Chakrabarty, Aditya Chandrasekar, Ramya Hebbalaguppe, Prathosh AP
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Object

Recent developments in the field of diffusion models have demonstrated an exceptional capacity to generate high-quality prompt-conditioned image edits. Nevertheless, previous approaches have primarily relied on textual prompts for image editing, which tend to be less effective when making precise edits to specific objects or fine-grained regions within a scene containing single/multiple objects. We introduce a novel framework for zero-shot localized multi-object editing through a multi-diffusion process to overcome this challenge. This framework empowers users to perform various operations on objects within an image, such as adding, replacing, or editing $\textbf{many}$ objects in a complex scene $\textbf{in one pass}$. Our approach leverages foreground masks and corresponding simple text prompts that exert localized influences on the target regions resulting in high-fidelity image editing. A combination of cross-attention and background preservation losses within the latent space ensures that the characteristics of the object being edited are preserved while simultaneously achieving a high-quality, seamless reconstruction of the background with fewer artifacts compared to the current methods. We also curate and release a dataset dedicated to multi-object editing, named $\texttt{LoMOE}$-Bench. Our experiments against existing state-of-the-art methods demonstrate the improved effectiveness of our approach in terms of both image editing quality and inference speed.
Abductive Ego-View Accident Video Understanding for Safe Driving Perception
Authors: Jianwu Fang, Lei-Lei Li, Junfei Zhou, Junbin Xiao, Hongkai Yu, Chen Lv, Jianru Xue, Tat-Seng Chua
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Video Generation, Video Understanding

We present MM-AU, a novel dataset for Multi-Modal Accident video Understanding. MM-AU contains 11,727 in-the-wild ego-view accident videos, each with temporally aligned text descriptions. We annotate over 2.23 million object boxes and 58,650 pairs of video-based accident reasons, covering 58 accident categories. MM-AU supports various accident understanding tasks, particularly multimodal video diffusion to understand accident cause-effect chains for safe driving. With MM-AU, we present an Abductive accident Video understanding framework for Safe Driving perception (AdVersa-SD). AdVersa-SD performs video diffusion via an Object-Centric Video Diffusion (OAVD) method which is driven by an abductive CLIP model. This model involves a contrastive interaction loss to learn the pair co-occurrence of normal, near-accident, accident frames with the corresponding text descriptions, such as accident reasons, prevention advice, and accident categories. OAVD enforces the causal region learning while fixing the content of the original frame background in video generation, to find the dominant cause-effect chain for certain accidents. Extensive experiments verify the abductive ability of AdVersa-SD and the superiority of OAVD against the state-of-the-art diffusion models. Additionally, we provide careful benchmark evaluations for object detection and accident reason answering since AdVersa-SD relies on precise object and accident reason information.
HALC: Object Hallucination Reduction via Adaptive Focal-Contrast Decoding
Authors: Zhaorun Chen, Zhuokai Zhao, Hongyin Luo, Huaxiu Yao, Bo Li, Jiawei Zhou
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Object, Object Hallucination, Text Generation

While large vision-language models (LVLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in interpreting multi-modal contexts, they invariably suffer from object hallucinations (OH). We introduce HALC, a novel decoding algorithm designed to mitigate OH in LVLMs. HALC leverages distinct fine-grained optimal visual information in vision-language tasks and operates on both local and global contexts simultaneously. Specifically, HALC integrates a robust auto-focal grounding mechanism (locally) to correct hallucinated tokens on the fly, and a specialized beam search algorithm (globally) to significantly reduce OH while preserving text generation quality. Additionally, HALC can be integrated into any LVLMs as a plug-and-play module without extra training. Extensive experimental studies demonstrate the effectiveness of HALC in reducing OH, outperforming state-of-the-arts across four benchmarks.
Robust Deep Reinforcement Learning Through Adversarial Attacks and Training : A Survey
Authors: Lucas Schott, Josephine Delas, Hatem Hajri, Elies Gherbi, Reda Yaich, Nora Boulahia-Cuppens, Frederic Cuppens, Sylvain Lamprier
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Deep Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning

Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) is a subfield of machine learning for training autonomous agents that take sequential actions across complex environments. Despite its significant performance in well-known environments, it remains susceptible to minor condition variations, raising concerns about its reliability in real-world applications. To improve usability, DRL must demonstrate trustworthiness and robustness. A way to improve the robustness of DRL to unknown changes in the environmental conditions and possible perturbations is through Adversarial Training, by training the agent against well-suited adversarial attacks on the observations and the dynamics of the environment. Addressing this critical issue, our work presents an in-depth analysis of contemporary adversarial attack and training methodologies, systematically categorizing them and comparing their objectives and operational mechanisms.
Zero-Shot Topic Classification of Column Headers: Leveraging LLMs for Metadata Enrichment
Authors: Margherita Martorana, Tobias Kuhn, Lise Stork, Jacco van Ossenbruggen
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, text-classification, Text Classification, Topic Classification

Traditional dataset retrieval systems rely on metadata for indexing, rather than on the underlying data values. However, high-quality metadata creation and enrichment often require manual annotations, which is a labour-intensive and challenging process to automate. In this study, we propose a method to support metadata enrichment using topic annotations generated by three Large Language Models (LLMs): ChatGPT-3.5, GoogleBard, and GoogleGemini. Our analysis focuses on classifying column headers based on domain-specific topics from the Consortium of European Social Science Data Archives (CESSDA), a Linked Data controlled vocabulary. Our approach operates in a zero-shot setting, integrating the controlled topic vocabulary directly within the input prompt. This integration serves as a Large Context Windows approach, with the aim of improving the results of the topic classification task. We evaluated the performance of the LLMs in terms of internal consistency, inter-machine alignment, and agreement with human classification. Additionally, we investigate the impact of contextual information (i.e., dataset description) on the classification outcomes. Our findings suggest that ChatGPT and GoogleGemini outperform GoogleBard in terms of internal consistency as well as LLM-human-agreement. Interestingly, we found that contextual information had no significant impact on LLM performance. This work proposes a novel approach that leverages LLMs for topic classification of column headers using a controlled vocabulary, presenting a practical application of LLMs and Large Context Windows within the Semantic Web domain. This approach has the potential to facilitate automated metadata enrichment, thereby enhancing dataset retrieval and the Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability (FAIR) of research data on the Web.
GLFNET: Global-Local (frequency) Filter Networks for efficient medical image segmentation
Authors: Athanasios Tragakis, Qianying Liu, Chaitanya Kaul, Swalpa Kumar Roy, Hang Dai, Fani Deligianni, Roderick Murray-Smith, Daniele Faccio
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

We propose a novel transformer-style architecture called Global-Local Filter Network (GLFNet) for medical image segmentation and demonstrate its state-of-the-art performance. We replace the self-attention mechanism with a combination of global-local filter blocks to optimize model efficiency. The global filters extract features from the whole feature map whereas the local filters are being adaptively created as 4x4 patches of the same feature map and add restricted scale information. In particular, the feature extraction takes place in the frequency domain rather than the commonly used spatial (image) domain to facilitate faster computations. The fusion of information from both spatial and frequency spaces creates an efficient model with regards to complexity, required data and performance. We test GLFNet on three benchmark datasets achieving state-of-the-art performance on all of them while being almost twice as efficient in terms of GFLOP operations.
Spurious Feature Eraser: Stabilizing Test-Time Adaptation for Vision-Language Foundation Model
Authors: Huan Ma, Yan Zhu, Changqing Zhang, Peilin Zhao, Baoyuan Wu, Long-Kai Huang, QinGhua Hu, Bingzhe Wu
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Fine-Grained Image Classification, image-classification, Image Classification, Language Modelling, Test-time Adaptation

Vision-language foundation models have exhibited remarkable success across a multitude of downstream tasks due to their scalability on extensive image-text paired data. However, these models also display significant limitations when applied to downstream tasks, such as fine-grained image classification, as a result of ``decision shortcuts'' that hinder their generalization capabilities. In this work, we find that the CLIP model possesses a rich set of features, encompassing both \textit{desired invariant causal features} and \textit{undesired decision shortcuts}. Moreover, the underperformance of CLIP on downstream tasks originates from its inability to effectively utilize pre-trained features in accordance with specific task requirements. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective method, Spurious Feature Eraser (SEraser), to alleviate the decision shortcuts by erasing the spurious features. Specifically, we introduce a test-time prompt tuning paradigm that optimizes a learnable prompt, thereby compelling the model to exploit invariant features while disregarding decision shortcuts during the inference phase. The proposed method effectively alleviates excessive dependence on potentially misleading spurious information. We conduct comparative analysis of the proposed method against various approaches which validates the significant superiority.
CIDGMed: Causal Inference-Driven Medication Recommendation with Enhanced Dual-Granularity Learning
Authors: Shunpan Liang, Xiang Li, Shi Mu, Chen Li, Yu Lei, Yulei Hou, Tengfei Ma
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Recommendation Systems, Representation Learning

Medication recommendation aims to integrate patients' long-term health records to provide accurate and safe medication combinations for specific health states. Existing methods often fail to deeply explore the true causal relationships between diseases/procedures and medications, resulting in biased recommendations. Additionally, in medication representation learning, the relationships between information at different granularities of medications, coarse-grained (medication itself) and fine-grained (molecular level), are not effectively integrated, leading to biases in representation learning. To address these limitations, we propose the Causal Inference-driven Dual-Granularity Medication Recommendation method (CIDGMed). Our approach leverages causal inference to uncover the relationships between diseases/procedures and medications, thereby enhancing the rationality and interpretability of recommendations. By integrating coarse-grained medication effects with fine-grained molecular structure information, CIDGMed provides a comprehensive representation of medications. Additionally, we employ a bias correction model during the prediction phase to further refine recommendations, ensuring both accuracy and safety. Through extensive experiments, CIDGMed significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art models across multiple metrics, achieving a 2.54% increase in accuracy, a 3.65% reduction in side effects, and a 39.42% improvement in time efficiency. Additionally, we demonstrate the rationale of CIDGMed through a case study.
Crimson: Empowering Strategic Reasoning in Cybersecurity through Large Language Models
Authors: Jiandong Jin, Bowen Tang, Mingxuan Ma, Xiao Liu, Yunfei Wang, Qingnan Lai, Jia Yang, Changling Zhou
Date: 2024-03-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Hallucination, Retrieval

We introduces Crimson, a system that enhances the strategic reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) within the realm of cybersecurity. By correlating CVEs with MITRE ATT&CK techniques, Crimson advances threat anticipation and strategic defense efforts. Our approach includes defining and evaluating cybersecurity strategic tasks, alongside implementing a comprehensive human-in-the-loop data-synthetic workflow to develop the CVE-to-ATT&CK Mapping (CVEM) dataset. We further enhance LLMs' reasoning abilities through a novel Retrieval-Aware Training (RAT) process and its refined iteration, RAT-R. Our findings demonstrate that an LLM fine-tuned with our techniques, possessing 7 billion parameters, approaches the performance level of GPT-4, showing markedly lower rates of hallucination and errors, and surpassing other models in strategic reasoning tasks. Moreover, domain-specific fine-tuning of embedding models significantly improves performance within cybersecurity contexts, underscoring the efficacy of our methodology. By leveraging Crimson to convert raw vulnerability data into structured and actionable insights, we bolster proactive cybersecurity defenses.