pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
MaskedMimic: Unified Physics-Based Character Control Through Masked Motion Inpainting
Authors: Chen Tessler, Yunrong Guo, Ofir Nabati, Gal Chechik, Xue Bin Peng
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00

Crafting a single, versatile physics-based controller that can breathe life into interactive characters across a wide spectrum of scenarios represents an exciting frontier in character animation. An ideal controller should support diverse control modalities, such as sparse target keyframes, text instructions, and scene information. While previous works have proposed physically simulated, scene-aware control models, these systems have predominantly focused on developing controllers that each specializes in a narrow set of tasks and control modalities. This work presents MaskedMimic, a novel approach that formulates physics-based character control as a general motion inpainting problem. Our key insight is to train a single unified model to synthesize motions from partial (masked) motion descriptions, such as masked keyframes, objects, text descriptions, or any combination thereof. This is achieved by leveraging motion tracking data and designing a scalable training method that can effectively utilize diverse motion descriptions to produce coherent animations. Through this process, our approach learns a physics-based controller that provides an intuitive control interface without requiring tedious reward engineering for all behaviors of interest. The resulting controller supports a wide range of control modalities and enables seamless transitions between disparate tasks. By unifying character control through motion inpainting, MaskedMimic creates versatile virtual characters. These characters can dynamically adapt to complex scenes and compose diverse motions on demand, enabling more interactive and immersive experiences.
OStr-DARTS: Differentiable Neural Architecture Search based on Operation Strength
Authors: Le Yang, Ziwei Zheng, Yizeng Han, Shiji Song, Gao Huang, Fan Li
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Neural Architecture Search

Differentiable architecture search (DARTS) has emerged as a promising technique for effective neural architecture search, and it mainly contains two steps to find the high-performance architecture: First, the DARTS supernet that consists of mixed operations will be optimized via gradient descent. Second, the final architecture will be built by the selected operations that contribute the most to the supernet. Although DARTS improves the efficiency of NAS, it suffers from the well-known degeneration issue which can lead to deteriorating architectures. Existing works mainly attribute the degeneration issue to the failure of its supernet optimization, while little attention has been paid to the selection method. In this paper, we cease to apply the widely-used magnitude-based selection method and propose a novel criterion based on operation strength that estimates the importance of an operation by its effect on the final loss. We show that the degeneration issue can be effectively addressed by using the proposed criterion without any modification of supernet optimization, indicating that the magnitude-based selection method can be a critical reason for the instability of DARTS. The experiments on NAS-Bench-201 and DARTS search spaces show the effectiveness of our method.
Scoring rule nets: beyond mean target prediction in multivariate regression
Authors: Daan Roordink, Sibylle Hess
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Form, regression, scoring rule, Sensitivity

Probabilistic regression models trained with maximum likelihood estimation (MLE), can sometimes overestimate variance to an unacceptable degree. This is mostly problematic in the multivariate domain. While univariate models often optimize the popular Continuous Ranked Probability Score (CRPS), in the multivariate domain, no such alternative to MLE has yet been widely accepted. The Energy Score - the most investigated alternative - notoriously lacks closed-form expressions and sensitivity to the correlation between target variables. In this paper, we propose Conditional CRPS: a multivariate strictly proper scoring rule that extends CRPS. We show that closed-form expressions exist for popular distributions and illustrate their sensitivity to correlation. We then show in a variety of experiments on both synthetic and real data, that Conditional CRPS often outperforms MLE, and produces results comparable to state-of-the-art non-parametric models, such as Distributional Random Forest (DRF).
Large Model Based Agents: State-of-the-Art, Cooperation Paradigms, Security and Privacy, and Future Trends
Authors: Yuntao Wang, Yanghe Pan, Zhou Su, Yi Deng, Quan Zhao, Linkang Du, Tom H. Luan, Jiawen Kang, Dusit Niyato
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixed Reality

With the rapid advancement of large models (LMs), the development of general-purpose intelligent agents powered by LMs has become a reality. It is foreseeable that in the near future, LM-driven general AI agents will serve as essential tools in production tasks, capable of autonomous communication and collaboration without human intervention. This paper investigates scenarios involving the autonomous collaboration of future LM agents. We review the current state of LM agents, the key technologies enabling LM agent collaboration, and the security and privacy challenges they face during cooperative operations. To this end, we first explore the foundational principles of LM agents, including their general architecture, key components, enabling technologies, and modern applications. We then discuss practical collaboration paradigms from data, computation, and knowledge perspectives to achieve connected intelligence among LM agents. After that, we analyze the security vulnerabilities and privacy risks associated with LM agents, particularly in multi-agent settings, examining underlying mechanisms and reviewing current and potential countermeasures. Lastly, we propose future research directions for building robust and secure LM agent ecosystems.
On logic and generative AI
Authors: Yuri Gurevich, Andreas Blass
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Philosophy

A hundred years ago, logic was almost synonymous with foundational studies. The ongoing AI revolution raises many deep foundational problems involving neuroscience, philosophy, computer science, and logic. The goal of the following dialog is to provoke young logicians with a taste for foundations to notice the foundational problems raised by the AI revolution.
Can Large Language Models Logically Predict Myocardial Infarction? Evaluation based on UK Biobank Cohort
Authors: Yuxing Zhi, Yuan Guo, Kai Yuan, Hesong Wang, Heng Xu, Haina Yao, Albert C Yang, Guangrui Huang, Yuping Duan
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00

Background: Large language models (LLMs) have seen extraordinary advances with applications in clinical decision support. However, high-quality evidence is urgently needed on the potential and limitation of LLMs in providing accurate clinical decisions based on real-world medical data. Objective: To evaluate quantitatively whether universal state-of-the-art LLMs (ChatGPT and GPT-4) can predict the incidence risk of myocardial infarction (MI) with logical inference, and to further make comparison between various models to assess the performance of LLMs comprehensively. Methods: In this retrospective cohort study, 482,310 participants recruited from 2006 to 2010 were initially included in UK Biobank database and later on resampled into a final cohort of 690 participants. For each participant, tabular data of the risk factors of MI were transformed into standardized textual descriptions for ChatGPT recognition. Responses were generated by asking ChatGPT to select a score ranging from 0 to 10 representing the risk. Chain of Thought (CoT) questioning was used to evaluate whether LLMs make prediction logically. The predictive performance of ChatGPT was compared with published medical indices, traditional machine learning models and other large language models. Conclusions: Current LLMs are not ready to be applied in clinical medicine fields. Future medical LLMs are suggested to be expert in medical domain knowledge to understand both natural languages and quantified medical data, and further make logical inferences.
On a measure of intelligence
Authors: Yuri Gurevich
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00

The Fall 2024 Logic in Computer Science column of the Bulletin of EATCS is a little discussion on intelligence, measuring intelligence, and related issues, provoked by a fascinating must-read article ``On the measure of intelligence'' by Fran\c{c}ois Chollet. The discussion includes a modicum of critique of the article.
Why Is Anything Conscious?
Authors: Michael Timothy Bennett, Sean Welsh, Anna Ciaunica
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00

We tackle the hard problem of consciousness taking the naturally selected, embodied organism as our starting point. We provide a formalism describing how biological systems self-organise to hierarchically interpret unlabelled sensory information according to valence. Such interpretations imply behavioural policies which are differentiated from each other only by the qualitative aspect of information processing. Natural selection favours systems that intervene in the world to achieve homeostatic and reproductive goals. Quality is a property arising in such systems to link cause to affect to motivate interventions. This produces interoceptive and exteroceptive classifiers and determines priorities. In formalising the seminal distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness, we claim that access consciousness at the human level requires the ability to hierarchically model i) the self, ii) the world/others and iii) the self as modelled by others, and that this requires phenomenal consciousness. Phenomenal without access consciousness is likely common, but the reverse is implausible. To put it provocatively: death grounds meaning, and Nature does not like zombies. We then describe the multilayered architecture of self-organisation from rocks to Einstein, illustrating how our argument applies. Our proposal lays the foundation of a formal science of consciousness, closer to human fact than zombie fiction.
Encoder with the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) to remove muscle artefacts from EEG signal
Authors: Ildar Rakhmatulin
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: EEG

This paper introduces a novel method for effectively removing artifacts from EEG signals by combining the Empirical Mode Decomposition (EMD) method with a machine learning architecture. The proposed method addresses the limitations of existing artifact removal techniques by enhancing the EMD method through interpolation of the upper and lower. For conventional artifact removal methods, the EMD technique is commonly employed. However, the challenge lies in accurately interpolating the missing components of the signal while preserving its inherent frequency components. To overcome this limitation, we incorporated machine learning technique, which enables us to carefully handle the interpolation process without directly manipulating the data. The key advantage of our approach lies in the preservation of the natural characteristics of the EEG signal during artifact removal. By utilizing machine learning for interpolation, we ensure that the average component obtained through the EMD method retains the crucial frequency components of the original signal. This preservation is essential for maintaining the integrity and fidelity of the EEG data, allowing for accurate analysis and interpretation. The results obtained from our evaluation serve to validate the effectiveness of our approach and pave the way for further advancements in EEG signal processing and analysis.
Evaluating Gender, Racial, and Age Biases in Large Language Models: A Comparative Analysis of Occupational and Crime Scenarios
Authors: Vishal Mirza, Rahul Kulkarni, Aakanksha Jadhav
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness

Recent advancements in Large Language Models(LLMs) have been notable, yet widespread enterprise adoption remains limited due to various constraints. This paper examines bias in LLMs-a crucial issue affecting their usability, reliability, and fairness. Researchers are developing strategies to mitigate bias, including debiasing layers, specialized reference datasets like Winogender and Winobias, and reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF). These techniques have been integrated into the latest LLMs. Our study evaluates gender bias in occupational scenarios and gender, age, and racial bias in crime scenarios across four leading LLMs released in 2024: Gemini 1.5 Pro, Llama 3 70B, Claude 3 Opus, and GPT-4o. Findings reveal that LLMs often depict female characters more frequently than male ones in various occupations, showing a 37% deviation from US BLS data. In crime scenarios, deviations from US FBI data are 54% for gender, 28% for race, and 17% for age. We observe that efforts to reduce gender and racial bias often lead to outcomes that may over-index one sub-class, potentially exacerbating the issue. These results highlight the limitations of current bias mitigation techniques and underscore the need for more effective approaches.
Brain Surgery: Ensuring GDPR Compliance in Large Language Models via Concept Erasure
Authors: Michele Laurelli
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Continual Learning, Ethics, Management

As large-scale AI systems proliferate, ensuring compliance with data privacy laws such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has become critical. This paper introduces Brain Surgery, a transformative methodology for making every local AI model GDPR-ready by enabling real-time privacy management and targeted unlearning. Building on advanced techniques such as Embedding-Corrupted Prompts (ECO Prompts), blockchain-based privacy management, and privacy-aware continual learning, Brain Surgery provides a modular solution that can be deployed across various AI architectures. This tool not only ensures compliance with privacy regulations but also empowers users to define their own privacy limits, creating a new paradigm in AI ethics and governance.
Semi-supervised Learning For Robust Speech Evaluation
Authors: Huayun Zhang, Jeremy H. M. Wong, Geyu Lin, Nancy F. Chen
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00

Speech evaluation measures a learners oral proficiency using automatic models. Corpora for training such models often pose sparsity challenges given that there often is limited scored data from teachers, in addition to the score distribution across proficiency levels being often imbalanced among student cohorts. Automatic scoring is thus not robust when faced with under-represented samples or out-of-distribution samples, which inevitably exist in real-world deployment scenarios. This paper proposes to address such challenges by exploiting semi-supervised pre-training and objective regularization to approximate subjective evaluation criteria. In particular, normalized mutual information is used to quantify the speech characteristics from the learner and the reference. An anchor model is trained using pseudo labels to predict the correctness of pronunciation. An interpolated loss function is proposed to minimize not only the prediction error with respect to ground-truth scores but also the divergence between two probability distributions estimated by the speech evaluation model and the anchor model. Compared to other state-of-the-art methods on a public data-set, this approach not only achieves high performance while evaluating the entire test-set as a whole, but also brings the most evenly distributed prediction error across distinct proficiency levels. Furthermore, empirical results show the model accuracy on out-of-distribution data also compares favorably with competitive baselines.
FedGCA: Global Consistent Augmentation Based Single-Source Federated Domain Generalization
Authors: YuAn Liu, Shu Wang, Zhe Qu, Xingyu Li, Shichao Kan, Jianxin Wang
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Generalization, Federated Learning

Federated Domain Generalization (FedDG) aims to train the global model for generalization ability to unseen domains with multi-domain training samples. However, clients in federated learning networks are often confined to a single, non-IID domain due to inherent sampling and temporal limitations. The lack of cross-domain interaction and the in-domain divergence impede the learning of domain-common features and limit the effectiveness of existing FedDG, referred to as the single-source FedDG (sFedDG) problem. To address this, we introduce the Federated Global Consistent Augmentation (FedGCA) method, which incorporates a style-complement module to augment data samples with diverse domain styles. To ensure the effective integration of augmented samples, FedGCA employs both global guided semantic consistency and class consistency, mitigating inconsistencies from local semantics within individual clients and classes across multiple clients. The conducted extensive experiments demonstrate the superiority of FedGCA.
Speechworthy Instruction-tuned Language Models
Authors: Hyundong Cho, Nicolaas Jedema, Leonardo F. R. Ribeiro, Karishma Sharma, Pedro Szekely, Alessandro Moschitti, Ruben Janssen, Jonathan May
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00

Current instruction-tuned language models are exclusively trained with textual preference data and thus are often not aligned with the unique requirements of other modalities, such as speech. To better align language models with the speech domain, we explore (i) prompting strategies grounded in radio-industry best practices and (ii) preference learning using a novel speech-based preference data of 20K samples, generated with a wide spectrum of prompts that induce varying dimensions of speech-suitability and labeled by annotators who listen to response pairs. Both human and automatic evaluation show that both prompting and preference learning increase the speech-suitability of popular instruction-tuned LLMs. Interestingly, we find that prompting and preference learning can be additive; combining them achieves the best win rates in head-to-head comparison, resulting in responses that are preferred or tied to the base model in 76.2% of comparisons on average. Lastly, we share lexical, syntactical, and qualitative analyses to showcase how each method contributes to improving the speech-suitability of generated responses.
SAMEdge: An Edge-cloud Video Analytics Architecture for the Segment Anything Model
Authors: Rui Lu, Siping Shi, Yanting Liu, Dan Wang
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Cloud Computing

As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it is increasingly capable of handling a wide range of video analytics tasks with merely one large model. One of the key foundation technologies is the Segment Anything Model (SAM), which allows the video analytics tasks to be determined on the fly according to the input prompts from the user. However, achieving real-time response in video analytics applications is crucial for user experiences due to the limited communication and computation resources on the edge, especially with SAM, where users may continuously interact by adding or adjusting prompts. In this paper, we propose SAMEdge, a novel edge-cloud computing architecture designed to support SAM computations for edge users. SAMEdge integrates new modules on the edge and the cloud to maximize analytics accuracy under visual prompts and image prompts input with latency constraints. It addresses resource challenges associated with prompt encoding and image encoding by offering a visual prompt transformation algorithm for visual prompts and efficient workload partitioning for image encoding. SAMEdge is implemented by extending the open-source SAM project from Meta AI. We demonstrate the practical application of SAMEdge through a case study on a Visual Tour Guide application. Our evaluation indicates that SAMEdge significantly enhances the accuracy of the video analytics application under distinct network bandwidths across various prompts.
Choose the Final Translation from NMT and LLM hypotheses Using MBR Decoding: HW-TSC's Submission to the WMT24 General MT Shared Task
Authors: Zhanglin Wu, Daimeng Wei, Zongyao Li, Hengchao Shang, Jiaxin Guo, Shaojun Li, Zhiqiang Rao, Yuanchang Luo, Ning Xie, Hao Yang
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Ensemble Learning, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Machine Translation, NMT, Translation

This paper presents the submission of Huawei Translate Services Center (HW-TSC) to the WMT24 general machine translation (MT) shared task, where we participate in the English to Chinese (en2zh) language pair. Similar to previous years' work, we use training strategies such as regularized dropout, bidirectional training, data diversification, forward translation, back translation, alternated training, curriculum learning, and transductive ensemble learning to train the neural machine translation (NMT) model based on the deep Transformer-big architecture. The difference is that we also use continue pre-training, supervised fine-tuning, and contrastive preference optimization to train the large language model (LLM) based MT model. By using Minimum Bayesian risk (MBR) decoding to select the final translation from multiple hypotheses for NMT and LLM-based MT models, our submission receives competitive results in the final evaluation.
Benchmarking Edge AI Platforms for High-Performance ML Inference
Authors: Rakshith Jayanth, Neelesh Gupta, Viktor Prasanna
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, CPU, GPU, Video Classification

Edge computing's growing prominence, due to its ability to reduce communication latency and enable real-time processing, is promoting the rise of high-performance, heterogeneous System-on-Chip solutions. While current approaches often involve scaling down modern hardware, the performance characteristics of neural network workloads on these platforms can vary significantly, especially when it comes to parallel processing, which is a critical consideration for edge deployments. To address this, we conduct a comprehensive study comparing the latency and throughput of various linear algebra and neural network inference tasks across CPU-only, CPU/GPU, and CPU/NPU integrated solutions. {We find that the Neural Processing Unit (NPU) excels in matrix-vector multiplication (58.6% faster) and some neural network tasks (3.2$\times$ faster for video classification and large language models). GPU outperforms in matrix multiplication (22.6% faster) and LSTM networks (2.7$\times$ faster) while CPU excels at less parallel operations like dot product. NPU-based inference offers a balance of latency and throughput at lower power consumption. GPU-based inference, though more energy-intensive, performs best with large dimensions and batch sizes. We highlight the potential of heterogeneous computing solutions for edge AI, where diverse compute units can be strategically leveraged to boost accurate and real-time inference.
Explainable and Human-Grounded AI for Decision Support Systems: The Theory of Epistemic Quasi-Partnerships
Authors: John Dorsch, Maximilian Moll
Date: 2024-09-23 00:00:00

In the context of AI decision support systems (AI-DSS), we argue that meeting the demands of ethical and explainable AI (XAI) is about developing AI-DSS to provide human decision-makers with three types of human-grounded explanations: reasons, counterfactuals, and confidence, an approach we refer to as the RCC approach. We begin by reviewing current empirical XAI literature that investigates the relationship between various methods for generating model explanations (e.g., LIME, SHAP, Anchors), the perceived trustworthiness of the model, and end-user accuracy. We demonstrate how current theories about what constitutes good human-grounded reasons either do not adequately explain this evidence or do not offer sound ethical advice for development. Thus, we offer a novel theory of human-machine interaction: the theory of epistemic quasi-partnerships (EQP). Finally, we motivate adopting EQP and demonstrate how it explains the empirical evidence, offers sound ethical advice, and entails adopting the RCC approach.