pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
AutoMIR: Effective Zero-Shot Medical Information Retrieval without Relevance Labels
Authors: Lei LI, Xiangxu Zhang, Xiao Zhou, Zheng Liu
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Information Retrieval, Retrieval, Self-Learning

Medical information retrieval (MIR) is essential for retrieving relevant medical knowledge from diverse sources, including electronic health records, scientific literature, and medical databases. However, achieving effective zero-shot dense retrieval in the medical domain poses substantial challenges due to the lack of relevance-labeled data. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach called Self-Learning Hypothetical Document Embeddings (SL-HyDE) to tackle this issue. SL-HyDE leverages large language models (LLMs) as generators to generate hypothetical documents based on a given query. These generated documents encapsulate key medical context, guiding a dense retriever in identifying the most relevant documents. The self-learning framework progressively refines both pseudo-document generation and retrieval, utilizing unlabeled medical corpora without requiring any relevance-labeled data. Additionally, we present the Chinese Medical Information Retrieval Benchmark (CMIRB), a comprehensive evaluation framework grounded in real-world medical scenarios, encompassing five tasks and ten datasets. By benchmarking ten models on CMIRB, we establish a rigorous standard for evaluating medical information retrieval systems. Experimental results demonstrate that SL-HyDE significantly surpasses existing methods in retrieval accuracy while showcasing strong generalization and scalability across various LLM and retriever configurations. CMIRB data and evaluation code are publicly available at: https://github.com/CMIRB-benchmark/CMIRB.
DQRM: Deep Quantized Recommendation Models
Authors: Yang Zhou, Zhen Dong, Ellick Chan, Dhiraj Kalamkar, Diana Marculescu, Kurt Keutzer
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Large-scale recommendation models are currently the dominant workload for many large Internet companies. These recommenders are characterized by massive embedding tables that are sparsely accessed by the index for user and item features. The size of these 1TB+ tables imposes a severe memory bottleneck for the training and inference of recommendation models. In this work, we propose a novel recommendation framework that is small, powerful, and efficient to run and train, based on the state-of-the-art Deep Learning Recommendation Model (DLRM). The proposed framework makes inference more efficient on the cloud servers, explores the possibility of deploying powerful recommenders on smaller edge devices, and optimizes the workload of the communication overhead in distributed training under the data parallelism settings. Specifically, we show that quantization-aware training (QAT) can impose a strong regularization effect to mitigate the severe overfitting issues suffered by DLRMs. Consequently, we achieved INT4 quantization of DLRM models without any accuracy drop. We further propose two techniques that improve and accelerate the conventional QAT workload specifically for the embedding tables in the recommendation models. Furthermore, to achieve efficient training, we quantize the gradients of the embedding tables into INT8 on top of the well-supported specified sparsification. We show that combining gradient sparsification and quantization together significantly reduces the amount of communication. Briefly, DQRM models with INT4 can achieve 79.07% accuracy on Kaggle with 0.27 GB model size, and 81.21% accuracy on the Terabyte dataset with 1.57 GB, which even outperform FP32 DLRMs that have much larger model sizes (2.16 GB on Kaggle and 12.58 on Terabyte).
Roles of LLMs in the Overall Mental Architecture
Authors: Ron Sun
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00

To better understand existing LLMs, we may examine the human mental (cognitive/psychological) architecture, and its components and structures. Based on psychological, philosophical, and cognitive science literatures, it is argued that, within the human mental architecture, existing LLMs correspond well with implicit mental processes (intuition, instinct, and so on). However, beyond such implicit processes, explicit processes (with better symbolic capabilities) are also present within the human mental architecture, judging from psychological, philosophical, and cognitive science literatures. Various theoretical and empirical issues and questions in this regard are explored. Furthermore, it is argued that existing dual-process computational cognitive architectures (models of the human cognitive/psychological architecture) provide usable frameworks for fundamentally enhancing LLMs by introducing dual processes (both implicit and explicit) and, in the meantime, can also be enhanced by LLMs. The results are synergistic combinations (in several different senses simultaneously).
Architectural Flaw Detection in Civil Engineering Using GPT-4
Authors: Saket Kumar, Abul Ehtesham, Aditi Singh, Tala Talaei Khoei
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00

The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in civil engineering presents a transformative approach to enhancing design quality and safety. This paper investigates the potential of the advanced LLM GPT4 Turbo vision model in detecting architectural flaws during the design phase, with a specific focus on identifying missing doors and windows. The study evaluates the model's performance through metrics such as precision, recall, and F1 score, demonstrating AI's effectiveness in accurately detecting flaws compared to human-verified data. Additionally, the research explores AI's broader capabilities, including identifying load-bearing issues, material weaknesses, and ensuring compliance with building codes. The findings highlight how AI can significantly improve design accuracy, reduce costly revisions, and support sustainable practices, ultimately revolutionizing the civil engineering field by ensuring safer, more efficient, and aesthetically optimized structures.
Training the Untrainable: Introducing Inductive Bias via Representational Alignment
Authors: Vighnesh Subramaniam, David Mayo, Colin Conwell, Tomaso Poggio, Boris Katz, Brian Cheung, Andrei Barbu
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Inductive Bias, Object Recognition

We demonstrate that architectures which traditionally are considered to be ill-suited for a task can be trained using inductive biases from another architecture. Networks are considered untrainable when they overfit, underfit, or converge to poor results even when tuning their hyperparameters. For example, plain fully connected networks overfit on object recognition while deep convolutional networks without residual connections underfit. The traditional answer is to change the architecture to impose some inductive bias, although what that bias is remains unknown. We introduce guidance, where a guide network guides a target network using a neural distance function. The target is optimized to perform well and to match its internal representations, layer-by-layer, to those of the guide; the guide is unchanged. If the guide is trained, this transfers over part of the architectural prior and knowledge of the guide to the target. If the guide is untrained, this transfers over only part of the architectural prior of the guide. In this manner, we can investigate what kinds of priors different architectures place on untrainable networks such as fully connected networks. We demonstrate that this method overcomes the immediate overfitting of fully connected networks on vision tasks, makes plain CNNs competitive to ResNets, closes much of the gap between plain vanilla RNNs and Transformers, and can even help Transformers learn tasks which RNNs can perform more easily. We also discover evidence that better initializations of fully connected networks likely exist to avoid overfitting. Our method provides a mathematical tool to investigate priors and architectures, and in the long term, may demystify the dark art of architecture creation, even perhaps turning architectures into a continuous optimizable parameter of the network.
Sensor2Text: Enabling Natural Language Interactions for Daily Activity Tracking Using Wearable Sensors
Authors: Wenqiang Chen, Jiaxuan Cheng, Leyao Wang, Wei Zhao, Wojciech Matusik
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Question Answering, Transfer Learning, Visual Question Answering

Visual Question-Answering, a technology that generates textual responses from an image and natural language question, has progressed significantly. Notably, it can aid in tracking and inquiring about daily activities, crucial in healthcare monitoring, especially for elderly patients or those with memory disabilities. However, video poses privacy concerns and has a limited field of view. This paper presents Sensor2Text, a model proficient in tracking daily activities and engaging in conversations using wearable sensors. The approach outlined here tackles several challenges, including low information density in wearable sensor data, insufficiency of single wearable sensors in human activities recognition, and model's limited capacity for Question-Answering and interactive conversations. To resolve these obstacles, transfer learning and student-teacher networks are utilized to leverage knowledge from visual-language models. Additionally, an encoder-decoder neural network model is devised to jointly process language and sensor data for conversational purposes. Furthermore, Large Language Models are also utilized to enable interactive capabilities. The model showcases the ability to identify human activities and engage in Q\&A dialogues using various wearable sensor modalities. It performs comparably to or better than existing visual-language models in both captioning and conversational tasks. To our knowledge, this represents the first model capable of conversing about wearable sensor data, offering an innovative approach to daily activity tracking that addresses privacy and field-of-view limitations associated with current vision-based solutions.
SCube: Instant Large-Scale Scene Reconstruction using VoxSplats
Authors: Xuanchi Ren, Yifan Lu, Hanxue Liang, Zhangjie Wu, Huan Ling, Mike Chen, Sanja Fidler, Francis Williams, Jiahui Huang
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Reconstruction, Scene Generation

We present SCube, a novel method for reconstructing large-scale 3D scenes (geometry, appearance, and semantics) from a sparse set of posed images. Our method encodes reconstructed scenes using a novel representation VoxSplat, which is a set of 3D Gaussians supported on a high-resolution sparse-voxel scaffold. To reconstruct a VoxSplat from images, we employ a hierarchical voxel latent diffusion model conditioned on the input images followed by a feedforward appearance prediction model. The diffusion model generates high-resolution grids progressively in a coarse-to-fine manner, and the appearance network predicts a set of Gaussians within each voxel. From as few as 3 non-overlapping input images, SCube can generate millions of Gaussians with a 1024^3 voxel grid spanning hundreds of meters in 20 seconds. Past works tackling scene reconstruction from images either rely on per-scene optimization and fail to reconstruct the scene away from input views (thus requiring dense view coverage as input) or leverage geometric priors based on low-resolution models, which produce blurry results. In contrast, SCube leverages high-resolution sparse networks and produces sharp outputs from few views. We show the superiority of SCube compared to prior art using the Waymo self-driving dataset on 3D reconstruction and demonstrate its applications, such as LiDAR simulation and text-to-scene generation.
Agentic Feedback Loop Modeling Improves Recommendation and User Simulation
Authors: Shihao Cai, Jizhi Zhang, Keqin Bao, Chongming Gao, Qifan Wang, Fuli Feng, Xiangnan He
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Large Language Model, User Simulation

Large language model-based agents are increasingly applied in the recommendation field due to their extensive knowledge and strong planning capabilities. While prior research has primarily focused on enhancing either the recommendation agent or the user agent individually, the collaborative interaction between the two has often been overlooked. Towards this research gap, we propose a novel framework that emphasizes the feedback loop process to facilitate the collaboration between the recommendation agent and the user agent. Specifically, the recommendation agent refines its understanding of user preferences by analyzing the feedback from the user agent on the item recommendation. Conversely, the user agent further identifies potential user interests based on the items and recommendation reasons provided by the recommendation agent. This iterative process enhances the ability of both agents to infer user behaviors, enabling more effective item recommendations and more accurate user simulations. Extensive experiments on three datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of the agentic feedback loop: the agentic feedback loop yields an average improvement of 11.52% over the single recommendation agent and 21.12% over the single user agent. Furthermore, the results show that the agentic feedback loop does not exacerbate popularity or position bias, which are typically amplified by the real-world feedback loop, highlighting its robustness. The source code is available at https://github.com/Lanyu0303/AFL.
Beyond Fine-Tuning: Effective Strategies for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Language Models for Data Analytics
Authors: Mikhail Rumiantsau, Aliaksei Vertsel, Ilya Hrytsuk, Isaiah Ballah
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Natural Language Queries, Structured Output Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become increasingly important in natural language processing, enabling advanced data analytics through natural language queries. However, these models often generate "hallucinations"-inaccurate or fabricated information-that can undermine their reliability in critical data-driven decision-making. Addressing the challenge of hallucinations is essential to improve the accuracy and trustworthiness of LLMs in processing natural language queries. This research focuses on mitigating hallucinations in LLMs, specifically within the context of data analytics. We introduce and evaluate four targeted strategies: Structured Output Generation, Strict Rules Enforcement, System Prompt Enhancements, and Semantic Layer Integration. Our findings show that these methods are more effective than traditional fine-tuning approaches in reducing hallucinations, offering a more reliable framework for deploying LLMs in natural language queries for data analytics. This research demonstrates the potential of these strategies to enhance the accuracy of LLM-driven data queries, ensuring more dependable results in data-driven environments.
Think Carefully and Check Again! Meta-Generation Unlocking LLMs for Low-Resource Cross-Lingual Summarization
Authors: Zhecheng Li, Yiwei Wang, Bryan Hooi, Yujun Cai, Naifan Cheung, Nanyun Peng, Kai-Wei Chang
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00

Cross-lingual summarization (CLS) aims to generate a summary for the source text in a different target language. Currently, instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) excel at various English tasks. However, unlike languages such as English, Chinese or Spanish, for those relatively low-resource languages with limited usage or data, recent studies have shown that LLMs' performance on CLS tasks remains unsatisfactory even with few-shot settings. This raises the question: Are LLMs capable of handling cross-lingual summarization tasks for low-resource languages? To resolve this question, we fully explore the potential of large language models on cross-lingual summarization task for low-resource languages through our four-step zero-shot method: Summarization, Improvement, Translation and Refinement (SITR) with correspondingly designed prompts. We test our proposed method with multiple LLMs on two well-known cross-lingual summarization datasets with various low-resource target languages. The results show that: i) GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 significantly and consistently outperform other baselines when using our zero-shot SITR methods. ii) By employing our proposed method, we unlock the potential of LLMs, enabling them to effectively handle cross-lingual summarization tasks for relatively low-resource languages.
GHIL-Glue: Hierarchical Control with Filtered Subgoal Images
Authors: Kyle B. Hatch, Ashwin Balakrishna, Oier Mees, Suraj Nair, Seohong Park, Blake Wulfe, Masha Itkina, Benjamin Eysenbach, Sergey Levine, Thomas Kollar, Benjamin Burchfiel
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning, Video Prediction, Zero-shot Generalization

Image and video generative models that are pre-trained on Internet-scale data can greatly increase the generalization capacity of robot learning systems. These models can function as high-level planners, generating intermediate subgoals for low-level goal-conditioned policies to reach. However, the performance of these systems can be greatly bottlenecked by the interface between generative models and low-level controllers. For example, generative models may predict photorealistic yet physically infeasible frames that confuse low-level policies. Low-level policies may also be sensitive to subtle visual artifacts in generated goal images. This paper addresses these two facets of generalization, providing an interface to effectively "glue together" language-conditioned image or video prediction models with low-level goal-conditioned policies. Our method, Generative Hierarchical Imitation Learning-Glue (GHIL-Glue), filters out subgoals that do not lead to task progress and improves the robustness of goal-conditioned policies to generated subgoals with harmful visual artifacts. We find in extensive experiments in both simulated and real environments that GHIL-Glue achieves a 25% improvement across several hierarchical models that leverage generative subgoals, achieving a new state-of-the-art on the CALVIN simulation benchmark for policies using observations from a single RGB camera. GHIL-Glue also outperforms other generalist robot policies across 3/4 language-conditioned manipulation tasks testing zero-shot generalization in physical experiments.
Off-Policy Selection for Initiating Human-Centric Experimental Design
Authors: Ge Gao, Xi Yang, Qitong Gao, Song Ju, Miroslav Pajic, Min Chi
Date: 2024-10-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Experimental Design, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

In human-centric tasks such as healthcare and education, the heterogeneity among patients and students necessitates personalized treatments and instructional interventions. While reinforcement learning (RL) has been utilized in those tasks, off-policy selection (OPS) is pivotal to close the loop by offline evaluating and selecting policies without online interactions, yet current OPS methods often overlook the heterogeneity among participants. Our work is centered on resolving a pivotal challenge in human-centric systems (HCSs): how to select a policy to deploy when a new participant joining the cohort, without having access to any prior offline data collected over the participant? We introduce First-Glance Off-Policy Selection (FPS), a novel approach that systematically addresses participant heterogeneity through sub-group segmentation and tailored OPS criteria to each sub-group. By grouping individuals with similar traits, FPS facilitates personalized policy selection aligned with unique characteristics of each participant or group of participants. FPS is evaluated via two important but challenging applications, intelligent tutoring systems and a healthcare application for sepsis treatment and intervention. FPS presents significant advancement in enhancing learning outcomes of students and in-hospital care outcomes.
Cooperative Strategic Planning Enhances Reasoning Capabilities in Large Language Models
Authors: Danqing Wang, Zhuorui Ye, Fei Fang, Lei LI
Date: 2024-10-25 00:00:00

Enhancing the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for enabling them to tackle complex, multi-step problems. Multi-agent frameworks have shown great potential in enhancing LLMs' reasoning capabilities. However, the lack of effective cooperation between LLM agents hinders their performance, especially for multi-step reasoning tasks. This paper proposes a novel cooperative multi-agent reasoning framework (CoPlanner) by separating reasoning steps and assigning distinct duties to different agents. CoPlanner consists of two LLM agents: a planning agent and a reasoning agent. The planning agent provides high-level strategic hints, while the reasoning agent follows these hints and infers answers. By training the planning agent's policy through the interactive reasoning process via Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO), the LLaMA-3-8B-based CoPlanner outperforms the previous best method by 9.94\% on LogiQA and 3.09\% on BBH. Our results demonstrate that the guidance from the planning agent and the effective cooperation between the agents contribute to the superior performance of CoPlanner in tackling multi-step reasoning problems.
Enhancing Battery Storage Energy Arbitrage with Deep Reinforcement Learning and Time-Series Forecasting
Authors: Manuel Sage, Joshua Campbell, Yaoyao Fiona Zhao
Date: 2024-10-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Energy arbitrage is one of the most profitable sources of income for battery operators, generating revenues by buying and selling electricity at different prices. Forecasting these revenues is challenging due to the inherent uncertainty of electricity prices. Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) emerged in recent years as a promising tool, able to cope with uncertainty by training on large quantities of historical data. However, without access to future electricity prices, DRL agents can only react to the currently observed price and not learn to plan battery dispatch. Therefore, in this study, we combine DRL with time-series forecasting methods from deep learning to enhance the performance on energy arbitrage. We conduct a case study using price data from Alberta, Canada that is characterized by irregular price spikes and highly non-stationary. This data is challenging to forecast even when state-of-the-art deep learning models consisting of convolutional layers, recurrent layers, and attention modules are deployed. Our results show that energy arbitrage with DRL-enabled battery control still significantly benefits from these imperfect predictions, but only if predictors for several horizons are combined. Grouping multiple predictions for the next 24-hour window, accumulated rewards increased by 60% for deep Q-networks (DQN) compared to the experiments without forecasts. We hypothesize that multiple predictors, despite their imperfections, convey useful information regarding the future development of electricity prices through a "majority vote" principle, enabling the DRL agent to learn more profitable control policies.