pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Forecasting the Future with Future Technologies: Advancements in Large Meteorological Models
Authors: Hailong Shu, Yue Wang, Weiwei Song, Huichuang Guo, Zhen Song
Date: 2024-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Optimization, Prediction

The field of meteorological forecasting has undergone a significant transformation with the integration of large models, especially those employing deep learning techniques. This paper reviews the advancements and applications of these models in weather prediction, emphasizing their role in transforming traditional forecasting methods. Models like FourCastNet, Pangu-Weather, GraphCast, ClimaX, and FengWu have made notable contributions by providing accurate, high-resolution forecasts, surpassing the capabilities of traditional Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP) models. These models utilize advanced neural network architectures, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), and Transformers, to process diverse meteorological data, enhancing predictive accuracy across various time scales and spatial resolutions. The paper addresses challenges in this domain, including data acquisition and computational demands, and explores future opportunities for model optimization and hardware advancements. It underscores the integration of artificial intelligence with conventional meteorological techniques, promising improved weather prediction accuracy and a significant contribution to addressing climate-related challenges. This synergy positions large models as pivotal in the evolving landscape of meteorological forecasting.
SafeGen: Mitigating Sexually Explicit Content Generation in Text-to-Image Models
Authors: Xinfeng Li, Yuchen Yang, Jiangyi Deng, Chen Yan, Yanjiao Chen, Xiaoyu Ji, Wenyuan Xu
Date: 2024-04-10 00:00:00

Text-to-image (T2I) models, such as Stable Diffusion, have exhibited remarkable performance in generating high-quality images from text descriptions in recent years. However, text-to-image models may be tricked into generating not-safe-for-work (NSFW) content, particularly in sexually explicit scenarios. Existing countermeasures mostly focus on filtering inappropriate inputs and outputs, or suppressing improper text embeddings, which can block sexually explicit content (e.g., naked) but may still be vulnerable to adversarial prompts -- inputs that appear innocent but are ill-intended. In this paper, we present SafeGen, a framework to mitigate sexual content generation by text-to-image models in a text-agnostic manner. The key idea is to eliminate explicit visual representations from the model regardless of the text input. In this way, the text-to-image model is resistant to adversarial prompts since such unsafe visual representations are obstructed from within. Extensive experiments conducted on four datasets and large-scale user studies demonstrate SafeGen's effectiveness in mitigating sexually explicit content generation while preserving the high-fidelity of benign images. SafeGen outperforms eight state-of-the-art baseline methods and achieves 99.4% sexual content removal performance. Furthermore, our constructed benchmark of adversarial prompts provides a basis for future development and evaluation of anti-NSFW-generation methods.
CulturalTeaming: AI-Assisted Interactive Red-Teaming for Challenging LLMs' (Lack of) Multicultural Knowledge
Authors: Yu Ying Chiu, Liwei Jiang, Maria Antoniak, Chan Young Park, Shuyue Stella Li, Mehar Bhatia, Sahithya Ravi, Yulia Tsvetkov, Vered Shwartz, Yejin Choi
Date: 2024-04-10 00:00:00
Tasks: Red Teaming

Frontier large language models (LLMs) are developed by researchers and practitioners with skewed cultural backgrounds and on datasets with skewed sources. However, LLMs' (lack of) multicultural knowledge cannot be effectively assessed with current methods for developing benchmarks. Existing multicultural evaluations primarily rely on expensive and restricted human annotations or potentially outdated internet resources. Thus, they struggle to capture the intricacy, dynamics, and diversity of cultural norms. LLM-generated benchmarks are promising, yet risk propagating the same biases they are meant to measure. To synergize the creativity and expert cultural knowledge of human annotators and the scalability and standardizability of LLM-based automation, we introduce CulturalTeaming, an interactive red-teaming system that leverages human-AI collaboration to build truly challenging evaluation dataset for assessing the multicultural knowledge of LLMs, while improving annotators' capabilities and experiences. Our study reveals that CulturalTeaming's various modes of AI assistance support annotators in creating cultural questions, that modern LLMs fail at, in a gamified manner. Importantly, the increased level of AI assistance (e.g., LLM-generated revision hints) empowers users to create more difficult questions with enhanced perceived creativity of themselves, shedding light on the promises of involving heavier AI assistance in modern evaluation dataset creation procedures. Through a series of 1-hour workshop sessions, we gather CULTURALBENCH-V0.1, a compact yet high-quality evaluation dataset with users' red-teaming attempts, that different families of modern LLMs perform with accuracy ranging from 37.7% to 72.2%, revealing a notable gap in LLMs' multicultural proficiency.
From Protoscience to Epistemic Monoculture: How Benchmarking Set the Stage for the Deep Learning Revolution
Authors: Bernard J. Koch, David Peterson
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Over the past decade, AI research has focused heavily on building ever-larger deep learning models. This approach has simultaneously unlocked incredible achievements in science and technology, and hindered AI from overcoming long-standing limitations with respect to explainability, ethical harms, and environmental efficiency. Drawing on qualitative interviews and computational analyses, our three-part history of AI research traces the creation of this "epistemic monoculture" back to a radical reconceptualization of scientific progress that began in the late 1980s. In the first era of AI research (1950s-late 1980s), researchers and patrons approached AI as a "basic" science that would advance through autonomous exploration and organic assessments of progress (e.g., peer-review, theoretical consensus). The failure of this approach led to a retrenchment of funding in the 1980s. Amid this "AI Winter," an intervention by the U.S. government reoriented the field towards measurable progress on tasks of military and commercial interest. A new evaluation system called "benchmarking" provided an objective way to quantify progress on tasks by focusing exclusively on increasing predictive accuracy on example datasets. Distilling science down to verifiable metrics clarified the roles of scientists, allowed the field to rapidly integrate talent, and provided clear signals of significance and progress. But history has also revealed a tradeoff to this streamlined approach to science: the consolidation around external interests and inherent conservatism of benchmarking has disincentivized exploration beyond scaling monoculture. In the discussion, we explain how AI's monoculture offers a compelling challenge to the belief that basic, exploration-driven research is needed for scientific progress. Implications for the spread of AI monoculture to other sciences in the era of generative AI are also discussed.
GenCHiP: Generating Robot Policy Code for High-Precision and Contact-Rich Manipulation Tasks
Authors: Kaylee Burns, Ajinkya Jain, Keegan Go, Fei Xia, Michael Stark, Stefan Schaal, Karol Hausman
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Contact-rich Manipulation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have been successful at generating robot policy code, but so far these results have been limited to high-level tasks that do not require precise movement. It is an open question how well such approaches work for tasks that require reasoning over contact forces and working within tight success tolerances. We find that, with the right action space, LLMs are capable of successfully generating policies for a variety of contact-rich and high-precision manipulation tasks, even under noisy conditions, such as perceptual errors or grasping inaccuracies. Specifically, we reparameterize the action space to include compliance with constraints on the interaction forces and stiffnesses involved in reaching a target pose. We validate this approach on subtasks derived from the Functional Manipulation Benchmark (FMB) and NIST Task Board Benchmarks. Exposing this action space alongside methods for estimating object poses improves policy generation with an LLM by greater than 3x and 4x when compared to non-compliant action spaces
Khayyam Challenge (PersianMMLU): Is Your LLM Truly Wise to The Persian Language?
Authors: Omid Ghahroodi, Marzia Nouri, Mohammad Vali Sanian, Alireza Sahebi, Doratossadat Dastgheib, Ehsaneddin Asgari, Mahdieh Soleymani Baghshah, Mohammad Hossein Rohban
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Information Retrieval

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) is challenging due to their generative nature, necessitating precise evaluation methodologies. Additionally, non-English LLM evaluation lags behind English, resulting in the absence or weakness of LLMs for many languages. In response to this necessity, we introduce Khayyam Challenge (also known as PersianMMLU), a meticulously curated collection comprising 20,192 four-choice questions sourced from 38 diverse tasks extracted from Persian examinations, spanning a wide spectrum of subjects, complexities, and ages. The primary objective of the Khayyam Challenge is to facilitate the rigorous evaluation of LLMs that support the Persian language. Distinctive features of the Khayyam Challenge are (i) its comprehensive coverage of various topics, including literary comprehension, mathematics, sciences, logic, intelligence testing, etc., aimed at assessing different facets of LLMs such as language comprehension, reasoning, and information retrieval across various educational stages, from lower primary school to upper secondary school (ii) its inclusion of rich metadata such as human response rates, difficulty levels, and descriptive answers (iii) its utilization of new data to avoid data contamination issues prevalent in existing frameworks (iv) its use of original, non-translated data tailored for Persian speakers, ensuring the framework is free from translation challenges and errors while encompassing cultural nuances (v) its inherent scalability for future data updates and evaluations without requiring special human effort. Previous works lacked an evaluation framework that combined all of these features into a single comprehensive benchmark. Furthermore, we evaluate a wide range of existing LLMs that support the Persian language, with statistical analyses and interpretations of their outputs.
Federated learning model for predicting major postoperative complications
Authors: Yonggi Park, Yuanfang Ren, Benjamin Shickel, Ziyuan Guan, Ayush Patela, Yingbo Ma, Zhenhong Hu, Tyler J. Loftus, Parisa Rashidi, Tezcan Ozrazgat-Baslanti, Azra Bihorac
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, model

Background: The accurate prediction of postoperative complication risk using Electronic Health Records (EHR) and artificial intelligence shows great potential. Training a robust artificial intelligence model typically requires large-scale and diverse datasets. In reality, collecting medical data often encounters challenges surrounding privacy protection. Methods: This retrospective cohort study includes adult patients who were admitted to UFH Gainesville (GNV) (n = 79,850) and Jacksonville (JAX) (n = 28,636) for any type of inpatient surgical procedure. Using perioperative and intraoperative features, we developed federated learning models to predict nine major postoperative complications (i.e., prolonged intensive care unit stay and mechanical ventilation). We compared federated learning models with local learning models trained on a single site and central learning models trained on pooled dataset from two centers. Results: Our federated learning models achieved the area under the receiver operating characteristics curve (AUROC) values ranged from 0.81 for wound complications to 0.92 for prolonged ICU stay at UFH GNV center. At UFH JAX center, these values ranged from 0.73-0.74 for wound complications to 0.92-0.93 for hospital mortality. Federated learning models achieved comparable AUROC performance to central learning models, except for prolonged ICU stay, where the performance of federated learning models was slightly higher than central learning models at UFH GNV center, but slightly lower at UFH JAX center. In addition, our federated learning model obtained comparable performance to the best local learning model at each center, demonstrating strong generalizability. Conclusion: Federated learning is shown to be a useful tool to train robust and generalizable models from large scale data across multiple institutions where data protection barriers are high.
Evolving Loss Functions for Specific Image Augmentation Techniques
Authors: Brandon Morgan, Dean Hougen
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Augmentation

Previous work in Neural Loss Function Search (NLFS) has shown a lack of correlation between smaller surrogate functions and large convolutional neural networks with massive regularization. We expand upon this research by revealing another disparity that exists, correlation between different types of image augmentation techniques. We show that different loss functions can perform well on certain image augmentation techniques, while performing poorly on others. We exploit this disparity by performing an evolutionary search on five types of image augmentation techniques in the hopes of finding image augmentation specific loss functions. The best loss functions from each evolution were then taken and transferred to WideResNet-28-10 on CIFAR-10 and CIFAR-100 across each of the five image augmentation techniques. The best from that were then taken and evaluated by fine-tuning EfficientNetV2Small on the CARS, Oxford-Flowers, and Caltech datasets across each of the five image augmentation techniques. Multiple loss functions were found that outperformed cross-entropy across multiple experiments. In the end, we found a single loss function, which we called the inverse bessel logarithm loss, that was able to outperform cross-entropy across the majority of experiments.
Counting Objects in a Robotic Hand
Authors: Francis Tsow, Tianze Chen, Yu Sun
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Object, Object Counting

A robot performing multi-object grasping needs to sense the number of objects in the hand after grasping. The count plays an important role in determining the robot's next move and the outcome and efficiency of the whole pick-place process. This paper presents a data-driven contrastive learning-based counting classifier with a modified loss function as a simple and effective approach for object counting despite significant occlusion challenges caused by robotic fingers and objects. The model was validated against other models with three different common shapes (spheres, cylinders, and cubes) in simulation and in a real setup. The proposed contrastive learning-based counting approach achieved above 96\% accuracy for all three objects in the real setup.
GOAT-Bench: A Benchmark for Multi-Modal Lifelong Navigation
Authors: Mukul Khanna, Ram Ramrakhya, Gunjan Chhablani, Sriram Yenamandra, Theophile Gervet, Matthew Chang, Zsolt Kira, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Dhruv Batra, Roozbeh Mottaghi
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Go to AnyThing, Navigate, Universal Navigation, Visual Navigation

The Embodied AI community has made significant strides in visual navigation tasks, exploring targets from 3D coordinates, objects, language descriptions, and images. However, these navigation models often handle only a single input modality as the target. With the progress achieved so far, it is time to move towards universal navigation models capable of handling various goal types, enabling more effective user interaction with robots. To facilitate this goal, we propose GOAT-Bench, a benchmark for the universal navigation task referred to as GO to AnyThing (GOAT). In this task, the agent is directed to navigate to a sequence of targets specified by the category name, language description, or image in an open-vocabulary fashion. We benchmark monolithic RL and modular methods on the GOAT task, analyzing their performance across modalities, the role of explicit and implicit scene memories, their robustness to noise in goal specifications, and the impact of memory in lifelong scenarios.
Collaborative Multi-source Domain Adaptation Through Optimal Transport
Authors: Omar Ghannou, Younès Bennani
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Federated Learning

Multi-source Domain Adaptation (MDA) seeks to adapt models trained on data from multiple labeled source domains to perform effectively on an unlabeled target domain data, assuming access to sources data. To address the challenges of model adaptation and data privacy, we introduce Collaborative MDA Through Optimal Transport (CMDA-OT), a novel framework consisting of two key phases. In the first phase, each source domain is independently adapted to the target domain using optimal transport methods. In the second phase, a centralized collaborative learning architecture is employed, which aggregates the N models from the N sources without accessing their data, thereby safeguarding privacy. During this process, the server leverages a small set of pseudo-labeled samples from the target domain, known as the target validation subset, to refine and guide the adaptation. This dual-phase approach not only improves model performance on the target domain but also addresses vital privacy challenges inherent in domain adaptation.
What AIs are not Learning (and Why)
Authors: Mark Stefik
Date: 2024-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

It is hard to make robots (including telerobots) that are useful, and harder still to make autonomous and collaborative robots that are robust and general. Current smart robots are created using manual programming, mathematical models, planning frameworks, and reinforcement learning. These methods do not lead to the leaps in performance and generality seen with deep learning, generative AI, and foundation models (FMs). Today's robots do not learn to provide home care, to be nursing assistants, or to do household chores nearly as well as people do. Addressing the aspirational goals of service robots requires improving how they are created. The high cost of bipedal multi-sensory robots ("bodies") is a significant obstacle for both research and deployment. A deeper issue is that mainstream FMs ("minds") are not created by agents sensing, acting, and learning in context in the real world. They do not lead to robots that communicate well or collaborate. They do not lead to robots that learn by experimenting, by asking others, and by imitation learning as appropriate. In short, they do not lead to robots that are ready to be deployed widely in human service applications. This paper focuses on what human-compatible service robots need to know. It recommends developing "robotic" FMs based on diverse experiential data.
Spatially Optimized Compact Deep Metric Learning Model for Similarity Search
Authors: Md. Farhadul Islam, Md. Tanzim Reza, Meem Arafat Manab, Mohammad Rakibul Hasan Mahin, Sarah Zabeen, Jannatun Noor
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Similarity Search, Metric Learning

Spatial optimization is often overlooked in many computer vision tasks. Filters should be able to recognize the features of an object regardless of where it is in the image. Similarity search is a crucial task where spatial features decide an important output. The capacity of convolution to capture visual patterns across various locations is limited. In contrast to convolution, the involution kernel is dynamically created at each pixel based on the pixel value and parameters that have been learned. This study demonstrates that utilizing a single layer of involution feature extractor alongside a compact convolution model significantly enhances the performance of similarity search. Additionally, we improve predictions by using the GELU activation function rather than the ReLU. The negligible amount of weight parameters in involution with a compact model with better performance makes the model very useful in real-world implementations. Our proposed model is below 1 megabyte in size. We have experimented with our proposed methodology and other models on CIFAR-10, FashionMNIST, and MNIST datasets. Our proposed method outperforms across all three datasets.
Less is More for Improving Automatic Evaluation of Factual Consistency
Authors: Tong Wang, Ninad Kulkarni, Yanjun Qi
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Text Generation

Assessing the factual consistency of automatically generated texts in relation to source context is crucial for developing reliable natural language generation applications. Recent literature proposes AlignScore which uses a unified alignment model to evaluate factual consistency and substantially outperforms previous methods across many benchmark tasks. In this paper, we take a closer look of datasets used in AlignScore and uncover an unexpected finding: utilizing a smaller number of data points can actually improve performance. We process the original AlignScore training dataset to remove noise, augment with robustness-enhanced samples, and utilize a subset comprising 10\% of the data to train an improved factual consistency evaluation model, we call LIM-RA (Less Is More for Robust AlignScore). LIM-RA demonstrates superior performance, consistently outperforming AlignScore and other strong baselines like ChatGPT across four benchmarks (two utilizing traditional natural language generation datasets and two focused on large language model outputs). Our experiments show that LIM-RA achieves the highest score on 24 of the 33 test datasets, while staying competitive on the rest, establishing the new state-of-the-art benchmarks.
Building A Knowledge Graph to Enrich ChatGPT Responses in Manufacturing Service Discovery
Authors: Yunqing Li, Binil Starly
Date: 2024-04-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graphs

Sourcing and identification of new manufacturing partners is crucial for manufacturing system integrators to enhance agility and reduce risk through supply chain diversification in the global economy. The advent of advanced large language models has captured significant interest, due to their ability to generate comprehensive and articulate responses across a wide range of knowledge domains. However, the system often falls short in accuracy and completeness when responding to domain-specific inquiries, particularly in areas like manufacturing service discovery. This research explores the potential of leveraging Knowledge Graphs in conjunction with ChatGPT to streamline the process for prospective clients in identifying small manufacturing enterprises. In this study, we propose a method that integrates bottom-up ontology with advanced machine learning models to develop a Manufacturing Service Knowledge Graph from an array of structured and unstructured data sources, including the digital footprints of small-scale manufacturers throughout North America. The Knowledge Graph and the learned graph embedding vectors are leveraged to tackle intricate queries within the digital supply chain network, responding with enhanced reliability and greater interpretability. The approach highlighted is scalable to millions of entities that can be distributed to form a global Manufacturing Service Knowledge Network Graph that can potentially interconnect multiple types of Knowledge Graphs that span industry sectors, geopolitical boundaries, and business domains. The dataset developed for this study, now publicly accessible, encompasses more than 13,000 manufacturers' weblinks, manufacturing services, certifications, and location entity types.