pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
On Stateful Value Factorization in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Enrico Marchesini, Andrea Baisero, Rupali Bhati, Christopher Amato
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Starcraft, Starcraft II

Value factorization is a popular paradigm for designing scalable multi-agent reinforcement learning algorithms. However, current factorization methods make choices without full justification that may limit their performance. For example, the theory in prior work uses stateless (i.e., history) functions, while the practical implementations use state information -- making the motivating theory a mismatch for the implementation. Also, methods have built off of previous approaches, inheriting their architectures without exploring other, potentially better ones. To address these concerns, we formally analyze the theory of using the state instead of the history in current methods -- reconnecting theory and practice. We then introduce DuelMIX, a factorization algorithm that learns distinct per-agent utility estimators to improve performance and achieve full expressiveness. Experiments on StarCraft II micromanagement and Box Pushing tasks demonstrate the benefits of our intuitions.
Handling Geometric Domain Shifts in Semantic Segmentation of Surgical RGB and Hyperspectral Images
Authors: Silvia Seidlitz, Jan Sellner, Alexander Studier-Fischer, Alessandro Motta, Berkin Özdemir, Beat P. Müller-Stich, Felix Nickel, Lena Maier-Hein
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Organ Segmentation, Scene Segmentation, Scene Understanding, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Robust semantic segmentation of intraoperative image data holds promise for enabling automatic surgical scene understanding and autonomous robotic surgery. While model development and validation are primarily conducted on idealistic scenes, geometric domain shifts, such as occlusions of the situs, are common in real-world open surgeries. To close this gap, we (1) present the first analysis of state-of-the-art (SOA) semantic segmentation models when faced with geometric out-of-distribution (OOD) data, and (2) propose an augmentation technique called "Organ Transplantation", to enhance generalizability. Our comprehensive validation on six different OOD datasets, comprising 600 RGB and hyperspectral imaging (HSI) cubes from 33 pigs, each annotated with 19 classes, reveals a large performance drop in SOA organ segmentation models on geometric OOD data. This performance decline is observed not only in conventional RGB data (with a dice similarity coefficient (DSC) drop of 46 %) but also in HSI data (with a DSC drop of 45 %), despite the richer spectral information content. The performance decline increases with the spatial granularity of the input data. Our augmentation technique improves SOA model performance by up to 67 % for RGB data and 90 % for HSI data, achieving performance at the level of in-distribution performance on real OOD test data. Given the simplicity and effectiveness of our augmentation method, it is a valuable tool for addressing geometric domain shifts in surgical scene segmentation, regardless of the underlying model. Our code and pre-trained models are publicly available at https://github.com/IMSY-DKFZ/htc.
What Is Required for Empathic AI? It Depends, and Why That Matters for AI Developers and Users
Authors: Jana Schaich Borg, Hannah Read
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

Interest is growing in artificial empathy, but so is confusion about what artificial empathy is or needs to be. This confusion makes it challenging to navigate the technical and ethical issues that accompany empathic AI development. Here, we outline a framework for thinking about empathic AI based on the premise that different constellations of capabilities associated with empathy are important for different empathic AI applications. We describe distinctions of capabilities that we argue belong under the empathy umbrella, and show how three medical empathic AI use cases require different sets of these capabilities. We conclude by discussing why appreciation of the diverse capabilities under the empathy umbrella is important for both AI creators and users.
What makes math problems hard for reinforcement learning: a case study
Authors: Ali Shehper, Anibal M. Medina-Mardones, Lucas Fagan, Bartłomiej Lewandowski, Angus Gruen, Yang Qiu, Piotr Kucharski, Zhenghan Wang, Sergei Gukov
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Using a long-standing conjecture from combinatorial group theory, we explore, from multiple perspectives, the challenges of finding rare instances carrying disproportionately high rewards. Based on lessons learned in the context defined by the Andrews-Curtis conjecture, we propose algorithmic enhancements and a topological hardness measure with implications for a broad class of search problems. As part of our study, we also address several open mathematical questions. Notably, we demonstrate the length reducibility of all but two presentations in the Akbulut-Kirby series (1981), and resolve various potential counterexamples in the Miller-Schupp series (1991), including three infinite subfamilies.
Bi-Factorial Preference Optimization: Balancing Safety-Helpfulness in Language Models
Authors: Wenxuan Zhang, Philip H. S. Torr, Mohamed Elhoseiny, Adel Bibi
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) on human preferences, typically through reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), has proven successful in enhancing their capabilities. However, ensuring the safety of LLMs during the fine-tuning remains a critical concern, and mitigating the potential conflicts in safety and helpfulness is costly in RLHF. To address this issue, we propose a supervised learning framework called Bi-Factorial Preference Optimization (BFPO), which re-parameterizes a joint RLHF objective of both safety and helpfulness into a single supervised learning objective. In the supervised optimization, a labeling function is used to capture global preferences ranking to balance both safety and helpfulness. To evaluate BFPO, we develop a benchmark including comprehensive discriminative and generative tasks for helpfulness and harmlessness. The results indicate that our method significantly outperforms existing approaches in both safety and helpfulness. Moreover, BFPO eliminates the need for human prompting and annotation in LLM fine-tuning while achieving the same level of safety as methods that heavily rely on human labor, with less than 10% of the computational resources. The training recipes and models will be released.
Parameter-Efficient Quantized Mixture-of-Experts Meets Vision-Language Instruction Tuning for Semiconductor Electron Micrograph Analysis
Authors: Sakhinana Sagar Srinivas, Chidaksh Ravuru, Geethan Sannidhi, Venkataramana Runkana
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Instruction Following, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Mixture-of-Experts

Semiconductors, crucial to modern electronics, are generally under-researched in foundational models. It highlights the need for research to enhance the semiconductor device technology portfolio and aid in high-end device fabrication. In this paper, we introduce sLAVA, a small-scale vision-language assistant tailored for semiconductor manufacturing, with a focus on electron microscopy image analysis. It addresses challenges of data scarcity and acquiring high-quality, expert-annotated data. We employ a teacher-student paradigm, using a foundational vision language model like GPT-4 as a teacher to create instruction-following multimodal data for customizing the student model, sLAVA, for electron microscopic image analysis tasks on consumer hardware with limited budgets. Our approach allows enterprises to further fine-tune the proposed framework with their proprietary data securely within their own infrastructure, protecting intellectual property. Rigorous experiments validate that our framework surpasses traditional methods, handles data shifts, and enables high-throughput screening.
TCNFormer: Temporal Convolutional Network Former for Short-Term Wind Speed Forecasting
Authors: Abid Hasan Zim, Aquib Iqbal, Asad Malik, Zhicheng Dong, Hanzhou Wu
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00

Global environmental challenges and rising energy demands have led to extensive exploration of wind energy technologies. Accurate wind speed forecasting (WSF) is crucial for optimizing wind energy capture and ensuring system stability. However, predicting wind speed remains challenging due to its inherent randomness, fluctuation, and unpredictability. This study proposes the Temporal Convolutional Network Former (TCNFormer) for short-term (12-hour) wind speed forecasting. The TCNFormer integrates the Temporal Convolutional Network (TCN) and transformer encoder to capture the spatio-temporal features of wind speed. The transformer encoder consists of two distinct attention mechanisms: causal temporal multi-head self-attention (CT-MSA) and temporal external attention (TEA). CT-MSA ensures that the output of a step derives only from previous steps, i.e., causality. Locality is also introduced to improve efficiency. TEA explores potential relationships between different sample sequences in wind speed data. This study utilizes wind speed data from the NASA Prediction of Worldwide Energy Resources (NASA POWER) of Patenga Sea Beach, Chittagong, Bangladesh (latitude 22.2352{\deg} N, longitude 91.7914{\deg} E) over a year (six seasons). The findings indicate that the TCNFormer outperforms state-of-the-art models in prediction accuracy. The proposed TCNFormer presents a promising method for spatio-temporal WSF and may achieve desirable performance in real-world applications of wind power systems.
The Uniqueness of LLaMA3-70B Series with Per-Channel Quantization
Authors: Minghai Qin
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

We have observed a distinctive quantization-related behavior in the LLaMA3/3.1-70B models that is absent in both the LLaMA2-70B and LLaMA3/3.1/3.2-1B/3B/8B/405B models. Quantization is a crucial technique for deploying large language models (LLMs) efficiently. The impact of W8A8 post-training quantization on model accuracy, especially on the recently released LLaMA3/3.1 model series, remains contentious. In this paper, we explore three key questions: What makes the LLaMA3-70B model series uniquely vulnerable to quantization? Why is this the case? And how can the issue be addressed? We empirically investigate multiple LLMs featured on an open LLM leaderboard, discovering that the LLaMA3-70B model series have a unique accuracy degradation behavior with W8A8 per-channel post-training quantization. In contrast, other model series such as LLaMA2, LLaMA3/3.1-8B, LLaMA3.2, Qwen, Mixtral, Mistral, Phi-3, and Falcon demonstrate robust performance with W8A8. Contrary to previous assertions attributing degradation to the large dynamic range of activations, our findings indicate that the weight distribution of the LLaMA3-70B is the primary factor behind the vulnerability. By meticulously analyzing the distinct characteristics of weight distributions across Transformer blocks, we propose two solutions that make different tradeoffs in hardware/software overhead. First, we propose a mixed strategy where less than 3\% of the layers employ finer per-group W8A8 quantization granularity. Second, we introduce a bi-smoothing strategy that balances quantization errors between weights and activations while maintaining per-channel quantization throughout. Experimental results demonstrate that both strategies effectively preserve the accuracy of the entire LLaMA3-70B model series under W8A8 quantization, achieving performance on par with their FP16 counterparts.
GIFT-SW: Gaussian noise Injected Fine-Tuning of Salient Weights for LLMs
Authors: Maxim Zhelnin, Viktor Moskvoretskii, Egor Shvetsov, Egor Venediktov, Mariya Krylova, Aleksandr Zuev, Evgeny Burnaev
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning, Quantization

Parameter Efficient Fine-Tuning (PEFT) methods have gained popularity and democratized the usage of Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent studies have shown that a small subset of weights significantly impacts performance. Based on this observation, we introduce a novel PEFT method, called Gaussian noise Injected Fine Tuning of Salient Weights (GIFT-SW). Our method updates only salient columns, while injecting Gaussian noise into non-salient ones. To identify these columns, we developeda generalized sensitivity metric that extends and unifies metrics from previous studies. Experiments with LLaMA models demonstrate that GIFT-SW outperforms full fine-tuning and modern PEFT methods under the same computational budget. Moreover, GIFT-SW offers practical advantages to recover performance of models subjected to mixed-precision quantization with keeping salient weights in full precision.
TourSynbio: A Multi-Modal Large Model and Agent Framework to Bridge Text and Protein Sequences for Protein Engineering
Authors: Yiqing Shen, Zan Chen, Michail Mamalakis, Yungeng Liu, Tianbin Li, Yanzhou Su, Junjun He, Pietro Liò, Yu Guang Wang
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Multiple-choice, Protein Folding

The structural similarities between protein sequences and natural languages have led to parallel advancements in deep learning across both domains. While large language models (LLMs) have achieved much progress in the domain of natural language processing, their potential in protein engineering remains largely unexplored. Previous approaches have equipped LLMs with protein understanding capabilities by incorporating external protein encoders, but this fails to fully leverage the inherent similarities between protein sequences and natural languages, resulting in sub-optimal performance and increased model complexity. To address this gap, we present TourSynbio-7B, the first multi-modal large model specifically designed for protein engineering tasks without external protein encoders. TourSynbio-7B demonstrates that LLMs can inherently learn to understand proteins as language. The model is post-trained and instruction fine-tuned on InternLM2-7B using ProteinLMDataset, a dataset comprising 17.46 billion tokens of text and protein sequence for self-supervised pretraining and 893K instructions for supervised fine-tuning. TourSynbio-7B outperforms GPT-4 on the ProteinLMBench, a benchmark of 944 manually verified multiple-choice questions, with 62.18% accuracy. Leveraging TourSynbio-7B's enhanced protein sequence understanding capability, we introduce TourSynbio-Agent, an innovative framework capable of performing various protein engineering tasks, including mutation analysis, inverse folding, protein folding, and visualization. TourSynbio-Agent integrates previously disconnected deep learning models in the protein engineering domain, offering a unified conversational user interface for improved usability. Finally, we demonstrate the efficacy of TourSynbio-7B and TourSynbio-Agent through two wet lab case studies on vanilla key enzyme modification and steroid compound catalysis.
YOLO-Stutter: End-to-end Region-Wise Speech Dysfluency Detection
Authors: Xuanru Zhou, Anshul Kashyap, Steve Li, Ayati Sharma, Brittany Morin, David Baquirin, Jet Vonk, Zoe Ezzes, Zachary Miller, Maria Luisa Gorno Tempini, Jiachen Lian, Gopala Krishna Anumanchipalli
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00

Dysfluent speech detection is the bottleneck for disordered speech analysis and spoken language learning. Current state-of-the-art models are governed by rule-based systems which lack efficiency and robustness, and are sensitive to template design. In this paper, we propose YOLO-Stutter: a first end-to-end method that detects dysfluencies in a time-accurate manner. YOLO-Stutter takes imperfect speech-text alignment as input, followed by a spatial feature aggregator, and a temporal dependency extractor to perform region-wise boundary and class predictions. We also introduce two dysfluency corpus, VCTK-Stutter and VCTK-TTS, that simulate natural spoken dysfluencies including repetition, block, missing, replacement, and prolongation. Our end-to-end method achieves state-of-the-art performance with a minimum number of trainable parameters for on both simulated data and real aphasia speech. Code and datasets are open-sourced at https://github.com/rorizzz/YOLO-Stutter
Evaluating the Predictive Features of Person-Centric Knowledge Graph Embeddings: Unfolding Ablation Studies
Authors: Christos Theodoropoulos, Natasha Mulligan, Joao Bettencourt-Silva
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Embeddings, Knowledge Graphs, Person-Centric Knowledge Graphs, Readmission Prediction, Representation Learning

Developing novel predictive models with complex biomedical information is challenging due to various idiosyncrasies related to heterogeneity, standardization or sparseness of the data. We previously introduced a person-centric ontology to organize information about individual patients, and a representation learning framework to extract person-centric knowledge graphs (PKGs) and to train Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). In this paper, we propose a systematic approach to examine the results of GNN models trained with both structured and unstructured information from the MIMIC-III dataset. Through ablation studies on different clinical, demographic, and social data, we show the robustness of this approach in identifying predictive features in PKGs for the task of readmission prediction.
Learning Granularity Representation for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Jinchuan Zhang, Tianqi Wan, Chong Mu, Guangxi Lu, Ling Tian
Date: 2024-08-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graphs, Link Prediction, Representation Learning, Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

Temporal Knowledge Graphs (TKGs) incorporate temporal information to reflect the dynamic structural knowledge and evolutionary patterns of real-world facts. Nevertheless, TKGs are still limited in downstream applications due to the problem of incompleteness. Consequently, TKG completion (also known as link prediction) has been widely studied, with recent research focusing on incorporating independent embeddings of time or combining them with entities and relations to form temporal representations. However, most existing methods overlook the impact of history from a multi-granularity aspect. The inherent semantics of human-defined temporal granularities, such as ordinal dates, reveal general patterns to which facts typically adhere. To counter this limitation, this paper proposes \textbf{L}earning \textbf{G}ranularity \textbf{Re}presentation (termed $\mathsf{LGRe}$) for TKG completion. It comprises two main components: Granularity Representation Learning (GRL) and Adaptive Granularity Balancing (AGB). Specifically, GRL employs time-specific multi-layer convolutional neural networks to capture interactions between entities and relations at different granularities. After that, AGB generates adaptive weights for these embeddings according to temporal semantics, resulting in expressive representations of predictions. Moreover, to reflect similar semantics of adjacent timestamps, a temporal loss function is introduced. Extensive experimental results on four event benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of $\mathsf{LGRe}$ in learning time-related representations. To ensure reproducibility, our code is available at https://github.com/KcAcoZhang/LGRe.
TEDRA: Text-based Editing of Dynamic and Photoreal Actors
Authors: Basavaraj Sunagad, Heming Zhu, Mohit Mendiratta, Adam Kortylewski, Christian Theobalt, Marc Habermann
Date: 2024-08-28 00:00:00

Over the past years, significant progress has been made in creating photorealistic and drivable 3D avatars solely from videos of real humans. However, a core remaining challenge is the fine-grained and user-friendly editing of clothing styles by means of textual descriptions. To this end, we present TEDRA, the first method allowing text-based edits of an avatar, which maintains the avatar's high fidelity, space-time coherency, as well as dynamics, and enables skeletal pose and view control. We begin by training a model to create a controllable and high-fidelity digital replica of the real actor. Next, we personalize a pretrained generative diffusion model by fine-tuning it on various frames of the real character captured from different camera angles, ensuring the digital representation faithfully captures the dynamics and movements of the real person. This two-stage process lays the foundation for our approach to dynamic human avatar editing. Utilizing this personalized diffusion model, we modify the dynamic avatar based on a provided text prompt using our Personalized Normal Aligned Score Distillation Sampling (PNA-SDS) within a model-based guidance framework. Additionally, we propose a time step annealing strategy to ensure high-quality edits. Our results demonstrate a clear improvement over prior work in functionality and visual quality.
ClimDetect: A Benchmark Dataset for Climate Change Detection and Attribution
Authors: Sungduk Yu, Brian L. White, Anahita Bhiwandiwalla, Musashi Hinck, Matthew Lyle Olson, Yaniv Gurwicz, Raanan Y. Rohekar, Tung Nguyen, Vasudev Lal
Date: 2024-08-28 00:00:00
Tasks: Change Detection

Detecting and attributing temperature increases driven by climate change is crucial for understanding global warming and informing adaptation strategies. However, distinguishing human-induced climate signals from natural variability remains challenging for traditional detection and attribution (D&A) methods, which rely on identifying specific "fingerprints" -- spatial patterns expected to emerge from external forcings such as greenhouse gas emissions. Deep learning offers promise in discerning these complex patterns within expansive spatial datasets, yet the lack of standardized protocols has hindered consistent comparisons across studies. To address this gap, we introduce ClimDetect, a standardized dataset comprising 1.17M daily climate snapshots paired with target climate change indicator variables. The dataset is curated from both CMIP6 climate model simulations and real-world observation-assimilated reanalysis datasets (ERA5, JRA-3Q, and MERRA-2), and is designed to enhance model accuracy in detecting climate change signals. ClimDetect integrates various input and target variables used in previous research, ensuring comparability and consistency across studies. We also explore the application of vision transformers (ViT) to climate data -- a novel approach that, to our knowledge, has not been attempted before for climate change detection tasks. Our open-access data serve as a benchmark for advancing climate science by enabling end-to-end model development and evaluation. ClimDetect is publicly accessible via Hugging Face dataset repository at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/ClimDetect/ClimDetect.