pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Bridging the Bosphorus: Advancing Turkish Large Language Models through Strategies for Low-Resource Language Adaptation and Benchmarking
Authors: Emre Can Acikgoz, Mete Erdogan, Deniz Yuret
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Model Selection, Transfer Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are becoming crucial across various fields, emphasizing the urgency for high-quality models in underrepresented languages. This study explores the unique challenges faced by low-resource languages, such as data scarcity, model selection, evaluation, and computational limitations, with a special focus on Turkish. We conduct an in-depth analysis to evaluate the impact of training strategies, model choices, and data availability on the performance of LLMs designed for underrepresented languages. Our approach includes two methodologies: (i) adapting existing LLMs originally pretrained in English to understand Turkish, and (ii) developing a model from the ground up using Turkish pretraining data, both supplemented with supervised fine-tuning on a novel Turkish instruction-tuning dataset aimed at enhancing reasoning capabilities. The relative performance of these methods is evaluated through the creation of a new leaderboard for Turkish LLMs, featuring benchmarks that assess different reasoning and knowledge skills. Furthermore, we conducted experiments on data and model scaling, both during pretraining and fine-tuning, simultaneously emphasizing the capacity for knowledge transfer across languages and addressing the challenges of catastrophic forgetting encountered during fine-tuning on a different language. Our goal is to offer a detailed guide for advancing the LLM framework in low-resource linguistic contexts, thereby making natural language processing (NLP) benefits more globally accessible.
TALC: Time-Aligned Captions for Multi-Scene Text-to-Video Generation
Authors: Hritik Bansal, Yonatan Bitton, Michal Yarom, Idan Szpektor, Aditya Grover, Kai-Wei Chang
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Text-to-Video Generation, Video Generation

Most of these text-to-video (T2V) generative models often produce single-scene video clips that depict an entity performing a particular action (e.g., 'a red panda climbing a tree'). However, it is pertinent to generate multi-scene videos since they are ubiquitous in the real-world (e.g., 'a red panda climbing a tree' followed by 'the red panda sleeps on the top of the tree'). To generate multi-scene videos from the pretrained T2V model, we introduce a simple and effective Time-Aligned Captions (TALC) framework. Specifically, we enhance the text-conditioning mechanism in the T2V architecture to recognize the temporal alignment between the video scenes and scene descriptions. For instance, we condition the visual features of the earlier and later scenes of the generated video with the representations of the first scene description (e.g., 'a red panda climbing a tree') and second scene description (e.g., 'the red panda sleeps on the top of the tree'), respectively. As a result, we show that the T2V model can generate multi-scene videos that adhere to the multi-scene text descriptions and be visually consistent (e.g., entity and background). Further, we finetune the pretrained T2V model with multi-scene video-text data using the TALC framework. We show that the TALC-finetuned model outperforms the baseline by achieving a relative gain of 29% in the overall score, which averages visual consistency and text adherence using human evaluation.
Responding to Generative AI Technologies with Research-through-Design: The Ryelands AI Lab as an Exploratory Study
Authors: Jesse Josua Benjamin, Joseph Lindley, Elizabeth Edwards, Elisa Rubegni, Tim Korjakow, David Grist, Rhiannon Sharkey
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00

Generative AI technologies demand new practical and critical competencies, which call on design to respond to and foster these. We present an exploratory study guided by Research-through-Design, in which we partnered with a primary school to develop a constructionist curriculum centered on students interacting with a generative AI technology. We provide a detailed account of the design of and outputs from the curriculum and learning materials, finding centrally that the reflexive and prolonged `hands-on' approach led to a co-development of students' practical and critical competencies. From the study, we contribute guidance for designing constructionist approaches to generative AI technology education; further arguing to do so with `critical responsivity.' We then discuss how HCI researchers may leverage constructionist strategies in designing interactions with generative AI technologies; and suggest that Research-through-Design can play an important role as a `rapid response methodology' capable of reacting to fast-evolving, disruptive technologies such as generative AI.
Proximal Policy Optimization with Adaptive Exploration
Authors: Andrei Lixandru
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Proximal Policy Optimization with Adaptive Exploration (axPPO) is introduced as a novel learning algorithm. This paper investigates the exploration-exploitation tradeoff within the context of reinforcement learning and aims to contribute new insights into reinforcement learning algorithm design. The proposed adaptive exploration framework dynamically adjusts the exploration magnitude during training based on the recent performance of the agent. Our proposed method outperforms standard PPO algorithms in learning efficiency, particularly when significant exploratory behavior is needed at the beginning of the learning process.
ACEGEN: Reinforcement learning of generative chemical agents for drug discovery
Authors: Albert Bou, Morgan Thomas, Sebastian Dittert, Carles Navarro Ramírez, Maciej Majewski, Ye Wang, Shivam Patel, Gary Tresadern, Mazen Ahmad, Vincent Moens, Woody Sherman, Simone Sciabola, Gianni de Fabritiis
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Decision Making, Drug Design, Drug Discovery, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In recent years, reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a valuable tool in drug design, offering the potential to propose and optimize molecules with desired properties. However, striking a balance between capabilities, flexibility, reliability, and efficiency remains challenging due to the complexity of advanced RL algorithms and the significant reliance on specialized code. In this work, we introduce ACEGEN, a comprehensive and streamlined toolkit tailored for generative drug design, built using TorchRL, a modern RL library that offers thoroughly tested reusable components. We validate ACEGEN by benchmarking against other published generative modeling algorithms and show comparable or improved performance. We also show examples of ACEGEN applied in multiple drug discovery case studies. ACEGEN is accessible at \url{https://github.com/acellera/acegen-open} and available for use under the MIT license.
A Self-Supervised Method for Body Part Segmentation and Keypoint Detection of Rat Images
Authors: László Kopácsi, Áron Fóthi, András Lőrincz
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Instance Segmentation, Keypoint Detection, Segmentation, Self-Driving Cars, Semantic Segmentation

Recognition of individual components and keypoint detection supported by instance segmentation is crucial to analyze the behavior of agents on the scene. Such systems could be used for surveillance, self-driving cars, and also for medical research, where behavior analysis of laboratory animals is used to confirm the aftereffects of a given medicine. A method capable of solving the aforementioned tasks usually requires a large amount of high-quality hand-annotated data, which takes time and money to produce. In this paper, we propose a method that alleviates the need for manual labeling of laboratory rats. To do so, first, we generate initial annotations with a computer vision-based approach, then through extensive augmentation, we train a deep neural network on the generated data. The final system is capable of instance segmentation, keypoint detection, and body part segmentation even when the objects are heavily occluded.
ResNCT: A Deep Learning Model for the Synthesis of Nephrographic Phase Images in CT Urography
Authors: Syed Jamal Safdar Gardezi, Lucas Aronson, Peter Wawrzyn, Hongkun Yu, E. Jason Abel, Daniel D. Shapiro, Meghan G. Lubner, Joshua Warner, Giuseppe Toia, Lu Mao, Pallavi Tiwari, Andrew L. Wentland
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, SSIM

Purpose: To develop and evaluate a transformer-based deep learning model for the synthesis of nephrographic phase images in CT urography (CTU) examinations from the unenhanced and urographic phases. Materials and Methods: This retrospective study was approved by the local Institutional Review Board. A dataset of 119 patients (mean $\pm$ SD age, 65 $\pm$ 12 years; 75/44 males/females) with three-phase CT urography studies was curated for deep learning model development. The three phases for each patient were aligned with an affine registration algorithm. A custom model, coined Residual transformer model for Nephrographic phase CT image synthesis (ResNCT), was developed and implemented with paired inputs of non-contrast and urographic sets of images trained to produce the nephrographic phase images, that were compared with the corresponding ground truth nephrographic phase images. The synthesized images were evaluated with multiple performance metrics, including peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR), structural similarity index (SSIM), normalized cross correlation coefficient (NCC), mean absolute error (MAE), and root mean squared error (RMSE). Results: The ResNCT model successfully generated synthetic nephrographic images from non-contrast and urographic image inputs. With respect to ground truth nephrographic phase images, the images synthesized by the model achieved high PSNR (27.8 $\pm$ 2.7 dB), SSIM (0.88 $\pm$ 0.05), and NCC (0.98 $\pm$ 0.02), and low MAE (0.02 $\pm$ 0.005) and RMSE (0.042 $\pm$ 0.016). Conclusion: The ResNCT model synthesized nephrographic phase CT images with high similarity to ground truth images. The ResNCT model provides a means of eliminating the acquisition of the nephrographic phase with a resultant 33% reduction in radiation dose for CTU examinations.
Folded Context Condensation in Path Integral Formalism for Infinite Context Transformers
Authors: Won-Gi Paeng, Daesuk Kwon, Kyungwon Jeong, Honggyo Suh
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00

In this work, we present a generalized formulation of the Transformer algorithm by reinterpreting its core mechanisms within the framework of Path Integral formalism. In this perspective, the attention mechanism is recast as a process that integrates all possible transition paths leading to future token states, with temporal evolution governed by the Feed-Forward Network. By systematically mapping each component of the Transformer to its counterpart in the Path Integral formulation, we obtain a more compact and efficient representation, in which the contextual information of a sequence is condensed into memory-like segments. These segments are recurrently processed across Transformer layers, enabling more effective long-term information retention. We validate the effectiveness of this approach through the Passkey retrieval task and a summarization task, demonstrating that the proposed method preserves historical information while exhibiting memory usage that scales linearly with sequence length. This contrasts with the non-linear memory growth typically observed in standard attention mechanisms. We expect that this quantum-inspired generalization of the Transformer architecture will open new avenues for enhancing both the efficiency and expressiveness of future Transformer models.
AI in Lung Health: Benchmarking Detection and Diagnostic Models Across Multiple CT Scan Datasets
Authors: Fakrul Islam Tushar, Avivah Wang, Lavsen Dahal, Michael R. Harowicz, Kyle J. Lafata, Tina D. Tailor, Joseph Y. Lo
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Cancer Classification, Diagnostic, Lung Cancer Diagnosis, Lung Nodule Detection

Lung cancer's high mortality rate can be mitigated by early detection, increasingly reliant on AI for diagnostic imaging. However, AI model performance depends on training and validation datasets. This study develops and validates AI models for both nodule detection and cancer classification tasks. For detection, two models (DLCSD-mD and LUNA16-mD) were developed using the Duke Lung Cancer Screening Dataset (DLCSD), with over 2,000 CT scans from 1,613 patients and more than 3,000 annotations. These models were evaluated on internal (DLCSD) and external datasets, including LUNA16 (601 patients, 1186 nodules) and NLST (969 patients, 1192 nodules), using FROC analysis and AUC metrics. For classification, five models were developed and tested: a randomly initialized 3D ResNet50, Genesis, MedNet3D, an enhanced ResNet50 using Strategic Warm-Start++ (SWS++), and a linear classifier analyzing features from the Foundation Model for Cancer Biomarkers (FMCB). These models were trained to distinguish between benign and malignant nodules and evaluated using AUC analysis on internal (DLCSD) and external datasets, including LUNA16 (433 patients, 677 nodules) and NLST. The DLCSD-mD model achieved an AUC of 0.93 (95% CI: 0.91-0.94) on the internal DLCSD dataset. External validation results were 0.97 (95% CI: 0.96-0.98) on LUNA16 and 0.75 (95% CI: 0.73-0.76) on NLST. For classification, the ResNet50-SWS++ model recorded AUCs of 0.71 (95% CI: 0.61-0.81) on DLCSD, 0.90 (95% CI: 0.87-0.93) on LUNA16, and 0.81 (95% CI: 0.79-0.82) on NLST. Other models showed varying performance across datasets, underscoring the importance of diverse model approaches. This benchmarking establishes DLCSD as a reliable resource for lung cancer AI research.
Inferring Discussion Topics about Exploitation of Vulnerabilities from Underground Hacking Forums
Authors: Felipe Moreno-Vera
Date: 2024-05-07 00:00:00

The increasing sophistication of cyber threats necessitates proactive measures to identify vulnerabilities and potential exploits. Underground hacking forums serve as breeding grounds for the exchange of hacking techniques and discussions related to exploitation. In this research, we propose an innovative approach using topic modeling to analyze and uncover key themes in vulnerabilities discussed within these forums. The objective of our study is to develop a machine learning-based model that can automatically detect and classify vulnerability-related discussions in underground hacking forums. By monitoring and analyzing the content of these forums, we aim to identify emerging vulnerabilities, exploit techniques, and potential threat actors. To achieve this, we collect a large-scale dataset consisting of posts and threads from multiple underground forums. We preprocess and clean the data to ensure accuracy and reliability. Leveraging topic modeling techniques, specifically Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA), we uncover latent topics and their associated keywords within the dataset. This enables us to identify recurring themes and prevalent discussions related to vulnerabilities, exploits, and potential targets.
Playing Games with your PET: Extending the Partial Exploration Tool to Stochastic Games
Authors: Tobias Meggendorfer, Maximilian Weininger
Date: 2024-05-06 00:00:00

We present version 2.0 of the Partial Exploration Tool (PET), a tool for verification of probabilistic systems. We extend the previous version by adding support for stochastic games, based on a recent unified framework for sound value iteration algorithms. Thereby, PET2 is the first tool implementing a sound and efficient approach for solving stochastic games with objectives of the type reachability/safety and mean payoff. We complement this approach by developing and implementing a partial-exploration based variant for all three objectives. Our experimental evaluation shows that PET2 offers the most efficient partial-exploration based algorithm and is the most viable tool on SGs, even outperforming unsound tools.
OpenESS: Event-based Semantic Scene Understanding with Open Vocabularies
Authors: Lingdong Kong, Youquan Liu, Lai Xing Ng, Benoit R. Cottereau, Wei Tsang Ooi
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation

Event-based semantic segmentation (ESS) is a fundamental yet challenging task for event camera sensing. The difficulties in interpreting and annotating event data limit its scalability. While domain adaptation from images to event data can help to mitigate this issue, there exist data representational differences that require additional effort to resolve. In this work, for the first time, we synergize information from image, text, and event-data domains and introduce OpenESS to enable scalable ESS in an open-world, annotation-efficient manner. We achieve this goal by transferring the semantically rich CLIP knowledge from image-text pairs to event streams. To pursue better cross-modality adaptation, we propose a frame-to-event contrastive distillation and a text-to-event semantic consistency regularization. Experimental results on popular ESS benchmarks showed our approach outperforms existing methods. Notably, we achieve 53.93% and 43.31% mIoU on DDD17 and DSEC-Semantic without using either event or frame labels.
Multi-Modal Data-Efficient 3D Scene Understanding for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Lingdong Kong, Xiang Xu, Jiawei Ren, Wenwei Zhang, Liang Pan, Kai Chen, Wei Tsang Ooi, Ziwei Liu
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, LIDAR Semantic Segmentation, Scene Understanding, Semantic Segmentation

Efficient data utilization is crucial for advancing 3D scene understanding in autonomous driving, where reliance on heavily human-annotated LiDAR point clouds challenges fully supervised methods. Addressing this, our study extends into semi-supervised learning for LiDAR semantic segmentation, leveraging the intrinsic spatial priors of driving scenes and multi-sensor complements to augment the efficacy of unlabeled datasets. We introduce LaserMix++, an evolved framework that integrates laser beam manipulations from disparate LiDAR scans and incorporates LiDAR-camera correspondences to further assist data-efficient learning. Our framework is tailored to enhance 3D scene consistency regularization by incorporating multi-modality, including 1) multi-modal LaserMix operation for fine-grained cross-sensor interactions; 2) camera-to-LiDAR feature distillation that enhances LiDAR feature learning; and 3) language-driven knowledge guidance generating auxiliary supervisions using open-vocabulary models. The versatility of LaserMix++ enables applications across LiDAR representations, establishing it as a universally applicable solution. Our framework is rigorously validated through theoretical analysis and extensive experiments on popular driving perception datasets. Results demonstrate that LaserMix++ markedly outperforms fully supervised alternatives, achieving comparable accuracy with five times fewer annotations and significantly improving the supervised-only baselines. This substantial advancement underscores the potential of semi-supervised approaches in reducing the reliance on extensive labeled data in LiDAR-based 3D scene understanding systems.
BenthicNet: A global compilation of seafloor images for deep learning applications
Authors: Scott C. Lowe, Benjamin Misiuk, Isaac Xu, Shakhboz Abdulazizov, Amit R. Baroi, Alex C. Bastos, Merlin Best, Vicki Ferrini, Ariell Friedman, Deborah Hart, Ove Hoegh-Guldberg, Daniel Ierodiaconou, Julia Mackin-McLaughlin, Kathryn Markey, Pedro S. Menandro, Jacquomo Monk, Shreya Nemani, John O'Brien, Elizabeth Oh, Luba Y. Reshitnyk, Katleen Robert, Chris M. Roelfsema, Jessica A. Sameoto, Alexandre C. G. Schimel, Jordan A. Thomson, Brittany R. Wilson, Melisa C. Wong, Craig J. Brown, Thomas Trappenberg
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Advances in underwater imaging enable the collection of extensive seafloor image datasets that are necessary for monitoring important benthic ecosystems. The ability to collect seafloor imagery has outpaced our capacity to analyze it, hindering expedient mobilization of this crucial environmental information. Recent machine learning approaches provide opportunities to increase the efficiency with which seafloor image datasets are analyzed, yet large and consistent datasets necessary to support development of such approaches are scarce. Here we present BenthicNet: a global compilation of seafloor imagery designed to support the training and evaluation of large-scale image recognition models. An initial set of over 11.4 million images was collected and curated to represent a diversity of seafloor environments using a representative subset of 1.3 million images. These are accompanied by 2.6 million annotations translated to the CATAMI scheme, which span 190,000 of the images. A large deep learning model was trained on this compilation and preliminary results suggest it has utility for automating large and small-scale image analysis tasks. The compilation and model are made openly available for use by the scientific community at https://doi.org/10.20383/103.0614.
EVA-X: A Foundation Model for General Chest X-ray Analysis with Self-supervised Learning
Authors: Jingfeng Yao, Xinggang Wang, Yuehao Song, Huangxuan Zhao, Jun Ma, Yajie Chen, Wenyu Liu, Bo wang
Date: 2024-05-08 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

The diagnosis and treatment of chest diseases play a crucial role in maintaining human health. X-ray examination has become the most common clinical examination means due to its efficiency and cost-effectiveness. Artificial intelligence analysis methods for chest X-ray images are limited by insufficient annotation data and varying levels of annotation, resulting in weak generalization ability and difficulty in clinical dissemination. Here we present EVA-X, an innovative foundational model based on X-ray images with broad applicability to various chest disease detection tasks. EVA-X is the first X-ray image based self-supervised learning method capable of capturing both semantic and geometric information from unlabeled images for universal X-ray image representation. Through extensive experimentation, EVA-X has demonstrated exceptional performance in chest disease analysis and localization, becoming the first model capable of spanning over 20 different chest diseases and achieving leading results in over 11 different detection tasks in the medical field. Additionally, EVA-X significantly reduces the burden of data annotation in the medical AI field, showcasing strong potential in the domain of few-shot learning. The emergence of EVA-X will greatly propel the development and application of foundational medical models, bringing about revolutionary changes in future medical research and clinical practice. Our codes and models are available at: https://github.com/hustvl/EVA-X.