pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Towards Realistic Long-tailed Semi-supervised Learning in an Open World
Authors: Yuanpeng He, Lijian Li
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Clustering, ROLSSL-Consistent, ROLSSL-Reversed, ROLSSL-Uniform

Open-world long-tailed semi-supervised learning (OLSSL) has increasingly attracted attention. However, existing OLSSL algorithms generally assume that the distributions between known and novel categories are nearly identical. Against this backdrop, we construct a more \emph{Realistic Open-world Long-tailed Semi-supervised Learning} (\textbf{ROLSSL}) setting where there is no premise on the distribution relationships between known and novel categories. Furthermore, even within the known categories, the number of labeled samples is significantly smaller than that of the unlabeled samples, as acquiring valid annotations is often prohibitively costly in the real world. Under the proposed ROLSSL setting, we propose a simple yet potentially effective solution called dual-stage post-hoc logit adjustments. The proposed approach revisits the logit adjustment strategy by considering the relationships among the frequency of samples, the total number of categories, and the overall size of data. Then, it estimates the distribution of unlabeled data for both known and novel categories to dynamically readjust the corresponding predictive probabilities, effectively mitigating category bias during the learning of known and novel classes with more selective utilization of imbalanced unlabeled data. Extensive experiments on datasets such as CIFAR100 and ImageNet100 have demonstrated performance improvements of up to 50.1\%, validating the superiority of our proposed method and establishing a strong baseline for this task. For further researches, the anonymous link to the experimental code is at \href{https://github.com/heyuanpengpku/ROLSSL}{\textcolor{brightpink}{https://github.com/heyuanpengpku/ROLSSL}}
SIAVC: Semi-Supervised Framework for Industrial Accident Video Classification
Authors: Zuoyong Li, Qinghua Lin, Haoyi Fan, Tiesong Zhao, David Zhang
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Fire Detection, Model Optimization, Pseudo Label, Video Classification

Semi-supervised learning suffers from the imbalance of labeled and unlabeled training data in the video surveillance scenario. In this paper, we propose a new semi-supervised learning method called SIAVC for industrial accident video classification. Specifically, we design a video augmentation module called the Super Augmentation Block (SAB). SAB adds Gaussian noise and randomly masks video frames according to historical loss on the unlabeled data for model optimization. Then, we propose a Video Cross-set Augmentation Module (VCAM) to generate diverse pseudo-label samples from the high-confidence unlabeled samples, which alleviates the mismatch of sampling experience and provides high-quality training data. Additionally, we construct a new industrial accident surveillance video dataset with frame-level annotation, namely ECA9, to evaluate our proposed method. Compared with the state-of-the-art semi-supervised learning based methods, SIAVC demonstrates outstanding video classification performance, achieving 88.76\% and 89.13\% accuracy on ECA9 and Fire Detection datasets, respectively. The source code and the constructed dataset ECA9 will be released in \url{https://github.com/AlchemyEmperor/SIAVC}.
Explainable automatic industrial carbon footprint estimation from bank transaction classification using natural language processing
Authors: Jaime González-González, Silvia García-Méndez, Francisco de Arriba-Pérez, Francisco J. González-Castaño, Óscar Barba-Seara
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00

Concerns about the effect of greenhouse gases have motivated the development of certification protocols to quantify the industrial carbon footprint (CF). These protocols are manual, work-intensive, and expensive. All of the above have led to a shift towards automatic data-driven approaches to estimate the CF, including Machine Learning (ML) solutions. Unfortunately, the decision-making processes involved in these solutions lack transparency from the end user's point of view, who must blindly trust their outcomes compared to intelligible traditional manual approaches. In this research, manual and automatic methodologies for CF estimation were reviewed, taking into account their transparency limitations. This analysis led to the proposal of a new explainable ML solution for automatic CF calculations through bank transaction classification. Consideration should be given to the fact that no previous research has considered the explainability of bank transaction classification for this purpose. For classification, different ML models have been employed based on their promising performance in the literature, such as Support Vector Machine, Random Forest, and Recursive Neural Networks. The results obtained were in the 90 % range for accuracy, precision, and recall evaluation metrics. From their decision paths, the proposed solution estimates the CO2 emissions associated with bank transactions. The explainability methodology is based on an agnostic evaluation of the influence of the input terms extracted from the descriptions of transactions using locally interpretable models. The explainability terms were automatically validated using a similarity metric over the descriptions of the target categories. Conclusively, the explanation performance is satisfactory in terms of the proximity of the explanations to the associated activity sector descriptions.
Enhanced Spatiotemporal Prediction Using Physical-guided And Frequency-enhanced Recurrent Neural Networks
Authors: Xuanle Zhao, Yue Sun, Tielin Zhang, Bo Xu
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Recognition, Prediction, Temporal Action Localization, Video Prediction, Weather Forecasting

Spatiotemporal prediction plays an important role in solving natural problems and processing video frames, especially in weather forecasting and human action recognition. Recent advances attempt to incorporate prior physical knowledge into the deep learning framework to estimate the unknown governing partial differential equations (PDEs), which have shown promising results in spatiotemporal prediction tasks. However, previous approaches only restrict neural network architectures or loss functions to acquire physical or PDE features, which decreases the representative capacity of a neural network. Meanwhile, the updating process of the physical state cannot be effectively estimated. To solve the above mentioned problems, this paper proposes a physical-guided neural network, which utilizes the frequency-enhanced Fourier module and moment loss to strengthen the model's ability to estimate the spatiotemporal dynamics. Furthermore, we propose an adaptive second-order Runge-Kutta method with physical constraints to model the physical states more precisely. We evaluate our model on both spatiotemporal and video prediction tasks. The experimental results show that our model outperforms state-of-the-art methods and performs best in several datasets, with a much smaller parameter count.
End-to-End User-Defined Keyword Spotting using Shifted Delta Coefficients
Authors: Kesavaraj V, Anuprabha M, Anil Kumar Vuppala
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Keyword Spotting

Identifying user-defined keywords is crucial for personalizing interactions with smart devices. Previous approaches of user-defined keyword spotting (UDKWS) have relied on short-term spectral features such as mel frequency cepstral coefficients (MFCC) to detect the spoken keyword. However, these features may face challenges in accurately identifying closely related pronunciation of audio-text pairs, due to their limited capability in capturing the temporal dynamics of the speech signal. To address this challenge, we propose to use shifted delta coefficients (SDC) which help in capturing pronunciation variability (transition between connecting phonemes) by incorporating long-term temporal information. The performance of the SDC feature is compared with various baseline features across four different datasets using a cross-attention based end-to-end system. Additionally, various configurations of SDC are explored to find the suitable temporal context for the UDKWS task. The experimental results reveal that the SDC feature outperforms the MFCC baseline feature, exhibiting an improvement of 8.32% in area under the curve (AUC) and 8.69% in terms of equal error rate (EER) on the challenging Libriphrase-hard dataset. Moreover, the proposed approach demonstrated superior performance when compared to state-of-the-art UDKWS techniques.
SLIFER: Investigating Performance and Robustness of Malware Detection Pipelines
Authors: Andrea Ponte, Dmitrijs Trizna, Luca Demetrio, Battista Biggio, Ivan Tesfai Ogbu, Fabio Roli
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Malware Detection

As a result of decades of research, Windows malware detection is approached through a plethora of techniques. However, there is an ongoing mismatch between academia -- which pursues an optimal performances in terms of detection rate and low false alarms -- and the requirements of real-world scenarios. In particular, academia focuses on combining static and dynamic analysis within a single or ensemble of models, falling into several pitfalls like (i) firing dynamic analysis without considering the computational burden it requires; (ii) discarding impossible-to-analyze samples; and (iii) analyzing robustness against adversarial attacks without considering that malware detectors are complemented with more non-machine-learning components. Thus, in this paper we bridge these gaps, by investigating the properties of malware detectors built with multiple and different types of analysis. To do so, we develop SLIFER, a Windows malware detection pipeline sequentially leveraging both static and dynamic analysis, interrupting computations as soon as one module triggers an alarm, requiring dynamic analysis only when needed. Contrary to the state of the art, we investigate how to deal with samples that impede analyzes, showing how much they impact performances, concluding that it is better to flag them as legitimate to not drastically increase false alarms. Lastly, we perform a robustness evaluation of SLIFER. Counter-intuitively, the injection of new content is either blocked more by signatures than dynamic analysis, due to byte artifacts created by the attack, or it is able to avoid detection from signatures, as they rely on constraints on file size disrupted by attacks. As far as we know, we are the first to investigate the properties of sequential malware detectors, shedding light on their behavior in real production environment.
MagicDrive3D: Controllable 3D Generation for Any-View Rendering in Street Scenes
Authors: Ruiyuan Gao, Kai Chen, Zhihao LI, Lanqing Hong, Zhenguo Li, Qiang Xu
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Generation, Autonomous Driving, BEV Segmentation, Scene Generation, Video Generation

While controllable generative models for images and videos have achieved remarkable success, high-quality models for 3D scenes, particularly in unbounded scenarios like autonomous driving, remain underdeveloped due to high data acquisition costs. In this paper, we introduce MagicDrive3D, a novel pipeline for controllable 3D street scene generation that supports multi-condition control, including BEV maps, 3D objects, and text descriptions. Unlike previous methods that reconstruct before training the generative models, MagicDrive3D first trains a video generation model and then reconstructs from the generated data. This innovative approach enables easily controllable generation and static scene acquisition, resulting in high-quality scene reconstruction. To address the minor errors in generated content, we propose deformable Gaussian splatting with monocular depth initialization and appearance modeling to manage exposure discrepancies across viewpoints. Validated on the nuScenes dataset, MagicDrive3D generates diverse, high-quality 3D driving scenes that support any-view rendering and enhance downstream tasks like BEV segmentation. Our results demonstrate the framework's superior performance, showcasing its potential for autonomous driving simulation and beyond.
Poisson Variational Autoencoder
Authors: Hadi Vafaii, Dekel Galor, Jacob L. Yates
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Bayesian Inference

Variational autoencoders (VAEs) employ Bayesian inference to interpret sensory inputs, mirroring processes that occur in primate vision across both ventral (Higgins et al., 2021) and dorsal (Vafaii et al., 2023) pathways. Despite their success, traditional VAEs rely on continuous latent variables, which deviates sharply from the discrete nature of biological neurons. Here, we developed the Poisson VAE (P-VAE), a novel architecture that combines principles of predictive coding with a VAE that encodes inputs into discrete spike counts. Combining Poisson-distributed latent variables with predictive coding introduces a metabolic cost term in the model loss function, suggesting a relationship with sparse coding which we verify empirically. Additionally, we analyze the geometry of learned representations, contrasting the P-VAE to alternative VAE models. We find that the P-VAE encodes its inputs in relatively higher dimensions, facilitating linear separability of categories in a downstream classification task with a much better (5x) sample efficiency. Our work provides an interpretable computational framework to study brain-like sensory processing and paves the way for a deeper understanding of perception as an inferential process.
Segformer++: Efficient Token-Merging Strategies for High-Resolution Semantic Segmentation
Authors: Daniel Kienzle, Marco Kantonis, Robin Schön, Rainer Lienhart
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification, Pose Estimation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Utilizing transformer architectures for semantic segmentation of high-resolution images is hindered by the attention's quadratic computational complexity in the number of tokens. A solution to this challenge involves decreasing the number of tokens through token merging, which has exhibited remarkable enhancements in inference speed, training efficiency, and memory utilization for image classification tasks. In this paper, we explore various token merging strategies within the framework of the Segformer architecture and perform experiments on multiple semantic segmentation and human pose estimation datasets. Notably, without model re-training, we, for example, achieve an inference acceleration of 61% on the Cityscapes dataset while maintaining the mIoU performance. Consequently, this paper facilitates the deployment of transformer-based architectures on resource-constrained devices and in real-time applications.
JointRF: End-to-End Joint Optimization for Dynamic Neural Radiance Field Representation and Compression
Authors: Zihan Zheng, Houqiang Zhong, Qiang Hu, Xiaoyun Zhang, Li Song, Ya zhang, Yanfeng Wang
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Feature Compression, NeRF

Neural Radiance Field (NeRF) excels in photo-realistically static scenes, inspiring numerous efforts to facilitate volumetric videos. However, rendering dynamic and long-sequence radiance fields remains challenging due to the significant data required to represent volumetric videos. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end joint optimization scheme of dynamic NeRF representation and compression, called JointRF, thus achieving significantly improved quality and compression efficiency against the previous methods. Specifically, JointRF employs a compact residual feature grid and a coefficient feature grid to represent the dynamic NeRF. This representation handles large motions without compromising quality while concurrently diminishing temporal redundancy. We also introduce a sequential feature compression subnetwork to further reduce spatial-temporal redundancy. Finally, the representation and compression subnetworks are end-to-end trained combined within the JointRF. Extensive experiments demonstrate that JointRF can achieve superior compression performance across various datasets.
Worldwide Federated Training of Language Models
Authors: Alex Iacob, Lorenzo Sani, Bill Marino, Preslav Aleksandrov, William F. Shen, Nicholas Donald Lane
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling

The reliance of language model training on massive amounts of computation and vast datasets scraped from potentially low-quality, copyrighted, or sensitive data has come into question practically, legally, and ethically. Federated learning provides a plausible alternative by enabling previously untapped data to be voluntarily gathered from collaborating organizations. However, when scaled globally, federated learning requires collaboration across heterogeneous legal, security, and privacy regimes while accounting for the inherent locality of language data; this further exacerbates the established challenge of federated statistical heterogeneity. We propose a Worldwide Federated Language Model Training~(WorldLM) system based on federations of federations, where each federation has the autonomy to account for factors such as its industry, operating jurisdiction, or competitive environment. WorldLM enables such autonomy in the presence of statistical heterogeneity via partial model localization by allowing sub-federations to attentively aggregate key layers from their constituents. Furthermore, it can adaptively share information across federations via residual layer embeddings. Evaluations of language modeling on naturally heterogeneous datasets show that WorldLM outperforms standard federations by up to $1.91\times$, approaches the personalized performance of fully local models, and maintains these advantages under privacy-enhancing techniques.
Exploring the use of a Large Language Model for data extraction in systematic reviews: a rapid feasibility study
Authors: Lena Schmidt, Kaitlyn Hair, Sergio Graziozi, Fiona Campbell, Claudia Kapp, Alireza Khanteymoori, Dawn Craig, Mark Engelbert, James Thomas
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, PICO

This paper describes a rapid feasibility study of using GPT-4, a large language model (LLM), to (semi)automate data extraction in systematic reviews. Despite the recent surge of interest in LLMs there is still a lack of understanding of how to design LLM-based automation tools and how to robustly evaluate their performance. During the 2023 Evidence Synthesis Hackathon we conducted two feasibility studies. Firstly, to automatically extract study characteristics from human clinical, animal, and social science domain studies. We used two studies from each category for prompt-development; and ten for evaluation. Secondly, we used the LLM to predict Participants, Interventions, Controls and Outcomes (PICOs) labelled within 100 abstracts in the EBM-NLP dataset. Overall, results indicated an accuracy of around 80%, with some variability between domains (82% for human clinical, 80% for animal, and 72% for studies of human social sciences). Causal inference methods and study design were the data extraction items with the most errors. In the PICO study, participants and intervention/control showed high accuracy (>80%), outcomes were more challenging. Evaluation was done manually; scoring methods such as BLEU and ROUGE showed limited value. We observed variability in the LLMs predictions and changes in response quality. This paper presents a template for future evaluations of LLMs in the context of data extraction for systematic review automation. Our results show that there might be value in using LLMs, for example as second or third reviewers. However, caution is advised when integrating models such as GPT-4 into tools. Further research on stability and reliability in practical settings is warranted for each type of data that is processed by the LLM.
LARS-VSA: A Vector Symbolic Architecture For Learning with Abstract Rules
Authors: Mohamed Mejri, Chandramouli Amarnath, Abhijit Chatterjee
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00

Human cognition excels at symbolic reasoning, deducing abstract rules from limited samples. This has been explained using symbolic and connectionist approaches, inspiring the development of a neuro-symbolic architecture that combines both paradigms. In parallel, recent studies have proposed the use of a "relational bottleneck" that separates object-level features from abstract rules, allowing learning from limited amounts of data . While powerful, it is vulnerable to the curse of compositionality meaning that object representations with similar features tend to interfere with each other. In this paper, we leverage hyperdimensional computing, which is inherently robust to such interference to build a compositional architecture. We adapt the "relational bottleneck" strategy to a high-dimensional space, incorporating explicit vector binding operations between symbols and relational representations. Additionally, we design a novel high-dimensional attention mechanism that leverages this relational representation. Our system benefits from the low overhead of operations in hyperdimensional space, making it significantly more efficient than the state of the art when evaluated on a variety of test datasets, while maintaining higher or equal accuracy.
RaFe: Ranking Feedback Improves Query Rewriting for RAG
Authors: Shengyu Mao, Yong Jiang, Boli Chen, Xiao Li, Peng Wang, Xinyu Wang, Pengjun Xie, Fei Huang, Huajun Chen, Ningyu Zhang
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval

As Large Language Models (LLMs) and Retrieval Augmentation Generation (RAG) techniques have evolved, query rewriting has been widely incorporated into the RAG system for downstream tasks like open-domain QA. Many works have attempted to utilize small models with reinforcement learning rather than costly LLMs to improve query rewriting. However, current methods require annotations (e.g., labeled relevant documents or downstream answers) or predesigned rewards for feedback, which lack generalization, and fail to utilize signals tailored for query rewriting. In this paper, we propose ours, a framework for training query rewriting models free of annotations. By leveraging a publicly available reranker, ours~provides feedback aligned well with the rewriting objectives. Experimental results demonstrate that ours~can obtain better performance than baselines.
PipeFusion: Patch-level Pipeline Parallelism for Diffusion Transformers Inference
Authors: Jiarui Fang, Jinzhe Pan, Jiannan Wang, Aoyu Li, Xibo Sun
Date: 2024-05-23 00:00:00

This paper presents PipeFusion, an innovative parallel methodology to tackle the high latency issues associated with generating high-resolution images using diffusion transformers (DiTs) models. PipeFusion partitions images into patches and the model layers across multiple GPUs. It employs a patch-level pipeline parallel strategy to orchestrate communication and computation efficiently. By capitalizing on the high similarity between inputs from successive diffusion steps, PipeFusion reuses one-step stale feature maps to provide context for the current pipeline step. This approach notably reduces communication costs compared to existing DiTs inference parallelism, including tensor parallel, sequence parallel and DistriFusion. PipeFusion also exhibits superior memory efficiency, because it can distribute model parameters across multiple devices, making it more suitable for DiTs with large parameter sizes, such as Flux.1. Experimental results demonstrate that PipeFusion achieves state-of-the-art performance on 8xL40 PCIe GPUs for Pixart, Stable-Diffusion 3 and Flux.1 models.Our Source code is available at https://github.com/xdit-project/xDiT.