pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Clustering in Causal Attention Masking
Authors: Nikita Karagodin, Yury Polyanskiy, Philippe Rigollet
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering

This work presents a modification of the self-attention dynamics proposed by Geshkovski et al. (arXiv:2312.10794) to better reflect the practically relevant, causally masked attention used in transformer architectures for generative AI. This modification translates into an interacting particle system that cannot be interpreted as a mean-field gradient flow. Despite this loss of structure, we significantly strengthen the results of Geshkovski et al. (arXiv:2312.10794) in this context: While previous rigorous results focused on cases where all three matrices (Key, Query, and Value) were scaled identities, we prove asymptotic convergence to a single cluster for arbitrary key-query matrices and a value matrix equal to the identity. Additionally, we establish a connection to the classical R\'enyi parking problem from combinatorial geometry to make initial theoretical steps towards demonstrating the existence of meta-stable states.
Few-Shot Task Learning through Inverse Generative Modeling
Authors: Aviv Netanyahu, Yilun Du, Antonia Bronars, Jyothish Pari, Joshua Tenenbaum, Tianmin Shu, Pulkit Agrawal
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Novel Concepts, Object Rearrangement

Learning the intents of an agent, defined by its goals or motion style, is often extremely challenging from just a few examples. We refer to this problem as task concept learning and present our approach, Few-Shot Task Learning through Inverse Generative Modeling (FTL-IGM), which learns new task concepts by leveraging invertible neural generative models. The core idea is to pretrain a generative model on a set of basic concepts and their demonstrations. Then, given a few demonstrations of a new concept (such as a new goal or a new action), our method learns the underlying concepts through backpropagation without updating the model weights, thanks to the invertibility of the generative model. We evaluate our method in five domains -- object rearrangement, goal-oriented navigation, motion caption of human actions, autonomous driving, and real-world table-top manipulation. Our experimental results demonstrate that via the pretrained generative model, we successfully learn novel concepts and generate agent plans or motion corresponding to these concepts in (1) unseen environments and (2) in composition with training concepts.
DINO-WM: World Models on Pre-trained Visual Features enable Zero-shot Planning
Authors: Gaoyue Zhou, Hengkai Pan, Yann Lecun, Lerrel Pinto
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00

The ability to predict future outcomes given control actions is fundamental for physical reasoning. However, such predictive models, often called world models, remains challenging to learn and are typically developed for task-specific solutions with online policy learning. To unlock world models' true potential, we argue that they should 1) be trainable on offline, pre-collected trajectories, 2) support test-time behavior optimization, and 3) facilitate task-agnostic reasoning. To this end, we present DINO World Model (DINO-WM), a new method to model visual dynamics without reconstructing the visual world. DINO-WM leverages spatial patch features pre-trained with DINOv2, enabling it to learn from offline behavioral trajectories by predicting future patch features. This allows DINO-WM to achieve observational goals through action sequence optimization, facilitating task-agnostic planning by treating goal features as prediction targets. We demonstrate that DINO-WM achieves zero-shot behavioral solutions at test time on six environments without expert demonstrations, reward modeling, or pre-learned inverse models, outperforming prior state-of-the-art work across diverse task families such as arbitrarily configured mazes, push manipulation with varied object shapes, and multi-particle scenarios.
Enhancing Reverse Engineering: Investigating and Benchmarking Large Language Models for Vulnerability Analysis in Decompiled Binaries
Authors: Dylan Manuel, Nafis Tanveer Islam, Joseph Khoury, Ana Nunez, Elias Bou-Harb, Peyman Najafirad
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

Security experts reverse engineer (decompile) binary code to identify critical security vulnerabilities. The limited access to source code in vital systems - such as firmware, drivers, and proprietary software used in Critical Infrastructures (CI) - makes this analysis even more crucial on the binary level. Even with available source code, a semantic gap persists after compilation between the source and the binary code executed by the processor. This gap may hinder the detection of vulnerabilities in source code. That being said, current research on Large Language Models (LLMs) overlooks the significance of decompiled binaries in this area by focusing solely on source code. In this work, we are the first to empirically uncover the substantial semantic limitations of state-of-the-art LLMs when it comes to analyzing vulnerabilities in decompiled binaries, largely due to the absence of relevant datasets. To bridge the gap, we introduce DeBinVul, a novel decompiled binary code vulnerability dataset. Our dataset is multi-architecture and multi-optimization, focusing on C/C++ due to their wide usage in CI and association with numerous vulnerabilities. Specifically, we curate 150,872 samples of vulnerable and non-vulnerable decompiled binary code for the task of (i) identifying; (ii) classifying; (iii) describing vulnerabilities; and (iv) recovering function names in the domain of decompiled binaries. Subsequently, we fine-tune state-of-the-art LLMs using DeBinVul and report on a performance increase of 19%, 24%, and 21% in the capabilities of CodeLlama, Llama3, and CodeGen2 respectively, in detecting binary code vulnerabilities. Additionally, using DeBinVul, we report a high performance of 80-90% on the vulnerability classification task. Furthermore, we report improved performance in function name recovery and vulnerability description tasks.
Position Paper On Diagnostic Uncertainty Estimation from Large Language Models: Next-Word Probability Is Not Pre-test Probability
Authors: Yanjun Gao, Skatje Myers, Shan Chen, Dmitriy Dligach, Timothy A Miller, Danielle Bitterman, Guanhua Chen, Anoop Mayampurath, Matthew Churpek, Majid Afshar
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Diagnostic, Position

Large language models (LLMs) are being explored for diagnostic decision support, yet their ability to estimate pre-test probabilities, vital for clinical decision-making, remains limited. This study evaluates two LLMs, Mistral-7B and Llama3-70B, using structured electronic health record data on three diagnosis tasks. We examined three current methods of extracting LLM probability estimations and revealed their limitations. We aim to highlight the need for improved techniques in LLM confidence estimation.
Uncovering Hidden Subspaces in Video Diffusion Models Using Re-Identification
Authors: Mischa Dombrowski, Hadrien Reynaud, Bernhard Kainz
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

Latent Video Diffusion Models can easily deceive casual observers and domain experts alike thanks to the produced image quality and temporal consistency. Beyond entertainment, this creates opportunities around safe data sharing of fully synthetic datasets, which are crucial in healthcare, as well as other domains relying on sensitive personal information. However, privacy concerns with this approach have not fully been addressed yet, and models trained on synthetic data for specific downstream tasks still perform worse than those trained on real data. This discrepancy may be partly due to the sampling space being a subspace of the training videos, effectively reducing the training data size for downstream models. Additionally, the reduced temporal consistency when generating long videos could be a contributing factor. In this paper, we first show that training privacy-preserving models in latent space is computationally more efficient and generalize better. Furthermore, to investigate downstream degradation factors, we propose to use a re-identification model, previously employed as a privacy preservation filter. We demonstrate that it is sufficient to train this model on the latent space of the video generator. Subsequently, we use these models to evaluate the subspace covered by synthetic video datasets and thus introduce a new way to measure the faithfulness of generative machine learning models. We focus on a specific application in healthcare echocardiography to illustrate the effectiveness of our novel methods. Our findings indicate that only up to 30.8% of the training videos are learned in latent video diffusion models, which could explain the lack of performance when training downstream tasks on synthetic data.
M3DocRAG: Multi-modal Retrieval is What You Need for Multi-page Multi-document Understanding
Authors: Jaemin Cho, Debanjan Mahata, Ozan Irsoy, Yujie He, Mohit Bansal
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: document understanding, Optical Character Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, Visual Question Answering

Document visual question answering (DocVQA) pipelines that answer questions from documents have broad applications. Existing methods focus on handling single-page documents with multi-modal language models (MLMs), or rely on text-based retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) that uses text extraction tools such as optical character recognition (OCR). However, there are difficulties in applying these methods in real-world scenarios: (a) questions often require information across different pages or documents, where MLMs cannot handle many long documents; (b) documents often have important information in visual elements such as figures, but text extraction tools ignore them. We introduce M3DocRAG, a novel multi-modal RAG framework that flexibly accommodates various document contexts (closed-domain and open-domain), question hops (single-hop and multi-hop), and evidence modalities (text, chart, figure, etc.). M3DocRAG finds relevant documents and answers questions using a multi-modal retriever and an MLM, so that it can efficiently handle single or many documents while preserving visual information. Since previous DocVQA datasets ask questions in the context of a specific document, we also present M3DocVQA, a new benchmark for evaluating open-domain DocVQA over 3,000+ PDF documents with 40,000+ pages. In three benchmarks (M3DocVQA/MMLongBench-Doc/MP-DocVQA), empirical results show that M3DocRAG with ColPali and Qwen2-VL 7B achieves superior performance than many strong baselines, including state-of-the-art performance in MP-DocVQA. We provide comprehensive analyses of different indexing, MLMs, and retrieval models. Lastly, we qualitatively show that M3DocRAG can successfully handle various scenarios, such as when relevant information exists across multiple pages and when answer evidence only exists in images.
SPGD: Steepest Perturbed Gradient Descent Optimization
Authors: Amir M. Vahedi, Horea T. Ilies
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

Optimization algorithms are pivotal in advancing various scientific and industrial fields but often encounter obstacles such as trapping in local minima, saddle points, and plateaus (flat regions), which makes the convergence to reasonable or near-optimal solutions particularly challenging. This paper presents the Steepest Perturbed Gradient Descent (SPGD), a novel algorithm that innovatively combines the principles of the gradient descent method with periodic uniform perturbation sampling to effectively circumvent these impediments and lead to better solutions whenever possible. SPGD is distinctively designed to generate a set of candidate solutions and select the one exhibiting the steepest loss difference relative to the current solution. It enhances the traditional gradient descent approach by integrating a strategic exploration mechanism that significantly increases the likelihood of escaping sub-optimal local minima and navigating complex optimization landscapes effectively. Our approach not only retains the directed efficiency of gradient descent but also leverages the exploratory benefits of stochastic perturbations, thus enabling a more comprehensive search for global optima across diverse problem spaces. We demonstrate the efficacy of SPGD in solving the 3D component packing problem, an NP-hard challenge. Preliminary results show a substantial improvement over four established methods, particularly on response surfaces with complex topographies and in multidimensional non-convex continuous optimization problems. Comparative analyses with established 2D benchmark functions highlight SPGD's superior performance, showcasing its ability to navigate complex optimization landscapes. These results emphasize SPGD's potential as a versatile tool for a wide range of optimization problems.
DimensionX: Create Any 3D and 4D Scenes from a Single Image with Controllable Video Diffusion
Authors: Wenqiang Sun, Shuo Chen, Fangfu Liu, Zilong Chen, Yueqi Duan, Jun Zhang, Yikai Wang
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Generation, Denoising, Scene Generation, Video Generation

In this paper, we introduce \textbf{DimensionX}, a framework designed to generate photorealistic 3D and 4D scenes from just a single image with video diffusion. Our approach begins with the insight that both the spatial structure of a 3D scene and the temporal evolution of a 4D scene can be effectively represented through sequences of video frames. While recent video diffusion models have shown remarkable success in producing vivid visuals, they face limitations in directly recovering 3D/4D scenes due to limited spatial and temporal controllability during generation. To overcome this, we propose ST-Director, which decouples spatial and temporal factors in video diffusion by learning dimension-aware LoRAs from dimension-variant data. This controllable video diffusion approach enables precise manipulation of spatial structure and temporal dynamics, allowing us to reconstruct both 3D and 4D representations from sequential frames with the combination of spatial and temporal dimensions. Additionally, to bridge the gap between generated videos and real-world scenes, we introduce a trajectory-aware mechanism for 3D generation and an identity-preserving denoising strategy for 4D generation. Extensive experiments on various real-world and synthetic datasets demonstrate that DimensionX achieves superior results in controllable video generation, as well as in 3D and 4D scene generation, compared with previous methods.
StoryAgent: Customized Storytelling Video Generation via Multi-Agent Collaboration
Authors: Panwen Hu, Jin Jiang, Jianqi Chen, Mingfei Han, Shengcai Liao, Xiaojun Chang, Xiaodan Liang
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Video Generation

The advent of AI-Generated Content (AIGC) has spurred research into automated video generation to streamline conventional processes. However, automating storytelling video production, particularly for customized narratives, remains challenging due to the complexity of maintaining subject consistency across shots. While existing approaches like Mora and AesopAgent integrate multiple agents for Story-to-Video (S2V) generation, they fall short in preserving protagonist consistency and supporting Customized Storytelling Video Generation (CSVG). To address these limitations, we propose StoryAgent, a multi-agent framework designed for CSVG. StoryAgent decomposes CSVG into distinct subtasks assigned to specialized agents, mirroring the professional production process. Notably, our framework includes agents for story design, storyboard generation, video creation, agent coordination, and result evaluation. Leveraging the strengths of different models, StoryAgent enhances control over the generation process, significantly improving character consistency. Specifically, we introduce a customized Image-to-Video (I2V) method, LoRA-BE, to enhance intra-shot temporal consistency, while a novel storyboard generation pipeline is proposed to maintain subject consistency across shots. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach in synthesizing highly consistent storytelling videos, outperforming state-of-the-art methods. Our contributions include the introduction of StoryAgent, a versatile framework for video generation tasks, and novel techniques for preserving protagonist consistency.
Enabling LLM Knowledge Analysis via Extensive Materialization
Authors: Yujia Hu, Tuan-Phong Nguyen, Shrestha Ghosh, Simon Razniewski
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Base Construction, Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have majorly advanced NLP and AI, and next to their ability to perform a wide range of procedural tasks, a major success factor is their internalized factual knowledge. Since Petroni et al. (2019), analyzing this knowledge has gained attention. However, most approaches investigate one question at a time via modest-sized pre-defined samples, introducing an ``availability bias'' (Tversky&Kahnemann, 1973) that prevents the analysis of knowledge (or beliefs) of LLMs beyond the experimenter's predisposition. To address this challenge, we propose a novel methodology to comprehensively materialize an LLM's factual knowledge through recursive querying and result consolidation. Our approach is a milestone for LLM research, for the first time providing constructive insights into the scope and structure of LLM knowledge (or beliefs). As a prototype, we build GPTKB, a knowledge base (KB) comprising 101 million relational triples for over 2.9 million entities from GPT-4o-mini. We use GPTKB to exemplarily analyze GPT-4o-mini's factual knowledge in terms of scale, accuracy, bias, cutoff and consistency, at the same time. GPTKB is accessible at https://gptkb.org
Evaluating Robustness of Reinforcement Learning Algorithms for Autonomous Shipping
Authors: Bavo Lesy, Ali Anwar, Siegfried Mercelis
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Motion Planning, Navigate, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recently, there has been growing interest in autonomous shipping due to its potential to improve maritime efficiency and safety. The use of advanced technologies, such as artificial intelligence, can address the current navigational and operational challenges in autonomous shipping. In particular, inland waterway transport (IWT) presents a unique set of challenges, such as crowded waterways and variable environmental conditions. In such dynamic settings, the reliability and robustness of autonomous shipping solutions are critical factors for ensuring safe operations. This paper examines the robustness of benchmark deep reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms, implemented for IWT within an autonomous shipping simulator, and their ability to generate effective motion planning policies. We demonstrate that a model-free approach can achieve an adequate policy in the simulator, successfully navigating port environments never encountered during training. We focus particularly on Soft-Actor Critic (SAC), which we show to be inherently more robust to environmental disturbances compared to MuZero, a state-of-the-art model-based RL algorithm. In this paper, we take a significant step towards developing robust, applied RL frameworks that can be generalized to various vessel types and navigate complex port- and inland environments and scenarios.
GUI Agents with Foundation Models: A Comprehensive Survey
Authors: Shuai Wang, Weiwen Liu, Jingxuan Chen, Yuqi Zhou, Weinan Gan, Xingshan Zeng, Yuhan Che, Shuai Yu, Xinlong Hao, Kun Shao, Bin Wang, Chuhan Wu, Yasheng Wang, Ruiming Tang, Jianye Hao
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Recent advances in foundation models, particularly Large Language Models (LLMs) and Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), have facilitated the development of intelligent agents capable of performing complex tasks. By leveraging the ability of (M)LLMs to process and interpret Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs), these agents can autonomously execute user instructions, simulating human-like interactions such as clicking and typing. This survey consolidates recent research on (M)LLM-based GUI agents, highlighting key innovations in data resources, frameworks, and applications. We begin by reviewing representative datasets and benchmarks, followed by an overview of a generalized, unified framework that encapsulates the essential components of prior studies, supported by a detailed taxonomy. Additionally, we explore relevant commercial applications. Drawing insights from existing work, we identify key challenges and propose future research directions. We hope this survey will inspire further advancements in the field of (M)LLM-based GUI agents.
FrontierMath: A Benchmark for Evaluating Advanced Mathematical Reasoning in AI
Authors: Elliot Glazer, Ege Erdil, Tamay Besiroglu, Diego Chicharro, Evan Chen, Alex Gunning, Caroline Falkman Olsson, Jean-Stanislas Denain, Anson Ho, Emily de Oliveira Santos, Olli Järviniemi, Matthew Barnett, Robert Sandler, Matej Vrzala, Jaime Sevilla, Qiuyu Ren, Elizabeth Pratt, Lionel Levine, Grant Barkley, Natalie Stewart, Bogdan Grechuk, Tetiana Grechuk, Shreepranav Varma Enugandla, Mark Wildon
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Mathematical Reasoning

We introduce FrontierMath, a benchmark of hundreds of original, exceptionally challenging mathematics problems crafted and vetted by expert mathematicians. The questions cover most major branches of modern mathematics -- from computationally intensive problems in number theory and real analysis to abstract questions in algebraic geometry and category theory. Solving a typical problem requires multiple hours of effort from a researcher in the relevant branch of mathematics, and for the upper end questions, multiple days. FrontierMath uses new, unpublished problems and automated verification to reliably evaluate models while minimizing risk of data contamination. Current state-of-the-art AI models solve under 2% of problems, revealing a vast gap between AI capabilities and the prowess of the mathematical community. As AI systems advance toward expert-level mathematical abilities, FrontierMath offers a rigorous testbed that quantifies their progress.
Think Smart, Act SMARL! Analyzing Probabilistic Logic Shields for Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Satchit Chatterji, Erman Acar
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Q-Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Safe Reinforcement Learning

Safe reinforcement learning (RL) is crucial for real-world applications, and multi-agent interactions introduce additional safety challenges. While Probabilistic Logic Shields (PLS) has been a powerful proposal to enforce safety in single-agent RL, their generalizability to multi-agent settings remains unexplored. In this paper, we address this gap by conducting extensive analyses of PLS within decentralized, multi-agent environments, and in doing so, propose Shielded Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (SMARL) as a general framework for steering MARL towards norm-compliant outcomes. Our key contributions are: (1) a novel Probabilistic Logic Temporal Difference (PLTD) update for shielded, independent Q-learning, which incorporates probabilistic constraints directly into the value update process; (2) a probabilistic logic policy gradient method for shielded PPO with formal safety guarantees for MARL; and (3) comprehensive evaluation across symmetric and asymmetrically shielded $n$-player game-theoretic benchmarks, demonstrating fewer constraint violations and significantly better cooperation under normative constraints. These results position SMARL as an effective mechanism for equilibrium selection, paving the way toward safer, socially aligned multi-agent systems.