pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Cooperative Path Planning with Asynchronous Multiagent Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Jiaming Yin, Weixiong Rao, Yu Xiao, Keshuang Tang
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we study the shortest path problem (SPP) with multiple source-destination pairs (MSD), namely MSD-SPP, to minimize average travel time of all shortest paths. The inherent traffic capacity limits within a road network contributes to the competition among vehicles. Multi-agent reinforcement learning (MARL) model cannot offer effective and efficient path planning cooperation due to the asynchronous decision making setting in MSD-SPP, where vehicles (a.k.a agents) cannot simultaneously complete routing actions in the previous time step. To tackle the efficiency issue, we propose to divide an entire road network into multiple sub-graphs and subsequently execute a two-stage process of inter-region and intra-region route planning. To address the asynchronous issue, in the proposed asyn-MARL framework, we first design a global state, which exploits a low-dimensional vector to implicitly represent the joint observations and actions of multi-agents. Then we develop a novel trajectory collection mechanism to decrease the redundancy in training trajectories. Additionally, we design a novel actor network to facilitate the cooperation among vehicles towards the same or close destinations and a reachability graph aimed at preventing infinite loops in routing paths. On both synthetic and real road networks, our evaluation result demonstrates that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art planning approaches.
MaskGCT: Zero-Shot Text-to-Speech with Masked Generative Codec Transformer
Authors: Yuancheng Wang, Haoyue Zhan, Liwei Liu, Ruihong Zeng, Haotian Guo, Jiachen Zheng, Qiang Zhang, Xueyao Zhang, Shunsi Zhang, Zhizheng Wu
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Self-Supervised Learning, text-to-speech, Text to Speech

The recent large-scale text-to-speech (TTS) systems are usually grouped as autoregressive and non-autoregressive systems. The autoregressive systems implicitly model duration but exhibit certain deficiencies in robustness and lack of duration controllability. Non-autoregressive systems require explicit alignment information between text and speech during training and predict durations for linguistic units (e.g. phone), which may compromise their naturalness. In this paper, we introduce Masked Generative Codec Transformer (MaskGCT), a fully non-autoregressive TTS model that eliminates the need for explicit alignment information between text and speech supervision, as well as phone-level duration prediction. MaskGCT is a two-stage model: in the first stage, the model uses text to predict semantic tokens extracted from a speech self-supervised learning (SSL) model, and in the second stage, the model predicts acoustic tokens conditioned on these semantic tokens. MaskGCT follows the mask-and-predict learning paradigm. During training, MaskGCT learns to predict masked semantic or acoustic tokens based on given conditions and prompts. During inference, the model generates tokens of a specified length in a parallel manner. Experiments with 100K hours of in-the-wild speech demonstrate that MaskGCT outperforms the current state-of-the-art zero-shot TTS systems in terms of quality, similarity, and intelligibility. Audio samples are available at https://maskgct.github.io/. We release our code and model checkpoints at https://github.com/open-mmlab/Amphion/blob/main/models/tts/maskgct.
Enabling Trustworthy Federated Learning in Industrial IoT: Bridging the Gap Between Interpretability and Robustness
Authors: Senthil Kumar Jagatheesaperumal, Mohamed Rahouti, Ali Alfatemi, Nasir Ghani, Vu Khanh Quy, Abdellah Chehri
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Federated Learning

Federated Learning (FL) represents a paradigm shift in machine learning, allowing collaborative model training while keeping data localized. This approach is particularly pertinent in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) context, where data privacy, security, and efficient utilization of distributed resources are paramount. The essence of FL in IIoT lies in its ability to learn from diverse, distributed data sources without requiring central data storage, thus enhancing privacy and reducing communication overheads. However, despite its potential, several challenges impede the widespread adoption of FL in IIoT, notably in ensuring interpretability and robustness. This article focuses on enabling trustworthy FL in IIoT by bridging the gap between interpretability and robustness, which is crucial for enhancing trust, improving decision-making, and ensuring compliance with regulations. Moreover, the design strategies summarized in this article ensure that FL systems in IIoT are transparent and reliable, vital in industrial settings where decisions have significant safety and economic impacts. The case studies in the IIoT environment driven by trustworthy FL models are provided, wherein the practical insights of trustworthy communications between IIoT systems and their end users are highlighted.
Interpretable Clustering: A Survey
Authors: Lianyu Hu, Mudi Jiang, Junjie Dong, Xinying Liu, Zengyou He
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Clustering, Survey

In recent years, much of the research on clustering algorithms has primarily focused on enhancing their accuracy and efficiency, frequently at the expense of interpretability. However, as these methods are increasingly being applied in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, finance, and autonomous systems, the need for transparent and interpretable clustering outcomes has become a critical concern. This is not only necessary for gaining user trust but also for satisfying the growing ethical and regulatory demands in these fields. Ensuring that decisions derived from clustering algorithms can be clearly understood and justified is now a fundamental requirement. To address this need, this paper provides a comprehensive and structured review of the current state of explainable clustering algorithms, identifying key criteria to distinguish between various methods. These insights can effectively assist researchers in making informed decisions about the most suitable explainable clustering methods for specific application contexts, while also promoting the development and adoption of clustering algorithms that are both efficient and transparent.
Simulation of Social Media-Driven Bubble Formation in Financial Markets using an Agent-Based Model with Hierarchical Influence Network
Authors: Gonzalo Bohorquez, John Cartlidge
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00

We propose that a tree-like hierarchical structure represents a simple and effective way to model the emergent behaviour of financial markets, especially markets where there exists a pronounced intersection between social media influences and investor behaviour. To explore this hypothesis, we introduce an agent-based model of financial markets, where trading agents are embedded in a hierarchical network of communities, and communities influence the strategies and opinions of traders. Empirical analysis of the model shows that its behaviour conforms to several stylized facts observed in real financial markets; and the model is able to realistically simulate the effects that social media-driven phenomena, such as echo chambers and pump-and-dump schemes, have on financial markets.
AgGym: An agricultural biotic stress simulation environment for ultra-precision management planning
Authors: Mahsa Khosravi, Matthew Carroll, Kai Liang Tan, Liza Van der Laan, Joscif Raigne, Daren S. Mueller, Arti Singh, Aditya Balu, Baskar Ganapathysubramanian, Asheesh Kumar Singh, Soumik Sarkar
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Reinforcement Learning, Management, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Agricultural production requires careful management of inputs such as fungicides, insecticides, and herbicides to ensure a successful crop that is high-yielding, profitable, and of superior seed quality. Current state-of-the-art field crop management relies on coarse-scale crop management strategies, where entire fields are sprayed with pest and disease-controlling chemicals, leading to increased cost and sub-optimal soil and crop management. To overcome these challenges and optimize crop production, we utilize machine learning tools within a virtual field environment to generate localized management plans for farmers to manage biotic threats while maximizing profits. Specifically, we present AgGym, a modular, crop and stress agnostic simulation framework to model the spread of biotic stresses in a field and estimate yield losses with and without chemical treatments. Our validation with real data shows that AgGym can be customized with limited data to simulate yield outcomes under various biotic stress conditions. We further demonstrate that deep reinforcement learning (RL) policies can be trained using AgGym for designing ultra-precise biotic stress mitigation strategies with potential to increase yield recovery with less chemicals and lower cost. Our proposed framework enables personalized decision support that can transform biotic stress management from being schedule based and reactive to opportunistic and prescriptive. We also release the AgGym software implementation as a community resource and invite experts to contribute to this open-sourced publicly available modular environment framework. The source code can be accessed at: https://github.com/SCSLabISU/AgGym.
Hound: Hunting Supervision Signals for Few and Zero Shot Node Classification on Text-attributed Graph
Authors: Yuxiang Wang, Xiao Yan, Shiyu Jin, Quanqing Xu, Chuanhui Yang, Yuanyuan Zhu, Chuang Hu, Bo Du, Jiawei Jiang
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Negation, Node Classification, TAG, Text Matching

Text-attributed graph (TAG) is an important type of graph structured data with text descriptions for each node. Few- and zero-shot node classification on TAGs have many applications in fields such as academia and social networks. However, the two tasks are challenging due to the lack of supervision signals, and existing methods only use the contrastive loss to align graph-based node embedding and language-based text embedding. In this paper, we propose Hound to improve accuracy by introducing more supervision signals, and the core idea is to go beyond the node-text pairs that come with data. Specifically, we design three augmentation techniques, i.e., node perturbation, text matching, and semantics negation to provide more reference nodes for each text and vice versa. Node perturbation adds/drops edges to produce diversified node embeddings that can be matched with a text. Text matching retrieves texts with similar embeddings to match with a node. Semantics negation uses a negative prompt to construct a negative text with the opposite semantics, which is contrasted with the original node and text. We evaluate Hound on 5 datasets and compare with 13 state-of-the-art baselines. The results show that Hound consistently outperforms all baselines, and its accuracy improvements over the best-performing baseline are usually over 5%.
LPUWF-LDM: Enhanced Latent Diffusion Model for Precise Late-phase UWF-FA Generation on Limited Dataset
Authors: Zhaojie Fang, Xiao Yu, Guanyu Zhou, Ke Zhuang, Yifei Chen, Ruiquan Ge, Changmiao Wang, Gangyong Jia, Qing Wu, Juan Ye, Maimaiti Nuliqiman, Peifang Xu, Ahmed Elazab
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00

Ultra-Wide-Field Fluorescein Angiography (UWF-FA) enables precise identification of ocular diseases using sodium fluorescein, which can be potentially harmful. Existing research has developed methods to generate UWF-FA from Ultra-Wide-Field Scanning Laser Ophthalmoscopy (UWF-SLO) to reduce the adverse reactions associated with injections. However, these methods have been less effective in producing high-quality late-phase UWF-FA, particularly in lesion areas and fine details. Two primary challenges hinder the generation of high-quality late-phase UWF-FA: the scarcity of paired UWF-SLO and early/late-phase UWF-FA datasets, and the need for realistic generation at lesion sites and potential blood leakage regions. This study introduces an improved latent diffusion model framework to generate high-quality late-phase UWF-FA from limited paired UWF images. To address the challenges as mentioned earlier, our approach employs a module utilizing Cross-temporal Regional Difference Loss, which encourages the model to focus on the differences between early and late phases. Additionally, we introduce a low-frequency enhanced noise strategy in the diffusion forward process to improve the realism of medical images. To further enhance the mapping capability of the variational autoencoder module, especially with limited datasets, we implement a Gated Convolutional Encoder to extract additional information from conditional images. Our Latent Diffusion Model for Ultra-Wide-Field Late-Phase Fluorescein Angiography (LPUWF-LDM) effectively reconstructs fine details in late-phase UWF-FA and achieves state-of-the-art results compared to other existing methods when working with limited datasets. Our source code is available at: https://github.com/Tinysqua/****.
BUET Multi-disease Heart Sound Dataset: A Comprehensive Auscultation Dataset for Developing Computer-Aided Diagnostic Systems
Authors: Shams Nafisa Ali, Afia Zahin, Samiul Based Shuvo, Nusrat Binta Nizam, Shoyad Ibn Sabur Khan Nuhash, Sayeed Sajjad Razin, S. M. Sakeef Sani, Farihin Rahman, Nawshad Binta Nizam, Farhat Binte Azam, Rakib Hossen, Sumaiya Ohab, Nawsabah Noor, Taufiq Hasan
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Diagnostic, Management, Sound Classification

Cardiac auscultation, an integral tool in diagnosing cardiovascular diseases (CVDs), often relies on the subjective interpretation of clinicians, presenting a limitation in consistency and accuracy. Addressing this, we introduce the BUET Multi-disease Heart Sound (BMD-HS) dataset - a comprehensive and meticulously curated collection of heart sound recordings. This dataset, encompassing 864 recordings across five distinct classes of common heart sounds, represents a broad spectrum of valvular heart diseases, with a focus on diagnostically challenging cases. The standout feature of the BMD-HS dataset is its innovative multi-label annotation system, which captures a diverse range of diseases and unique disease states. This system significantly enhances the dataset's utility for developing advanced machine learning models in automated heart sound classification and diagnosis. By bridging the gap between traditional auscultation practices and contemporary data-driven diagnostic methods, the BMD-HS dataset is poised to revolutionize CVD diagnosis and management, providing an invaluable resource for the advancement of cardiac health research. The dataset is publicly available at this link: https://github.com/mHealthBuet/BMD-HS-Dataset.
Multiscale Color Guided Attention Ensemble Classifier for Age-Related Macular Degeneration using Concurrent Fundus and Optical Coherence Tomography Images
Authors: Pragya Gupta, Subhamoy Mandal, Debashree Guha, Debjani Chakraborty
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

Automatic diagnosis techniques have evolved to identify age-related macular degeneration (AMD) by employing single modality Fundus images or optical coherence tomography (OCT). To classify ocular diseases, fundus and OCT images are the most crucial imaging modalities used in the clinical setting. Most deep learning-based techniques are established on a single imaging modality, which contemplates the ocular disorders to a specific extent and disregards other modality that comprises exhaustive information among distinct imaging modalities. This paper proposes a modality-specific multiscale color space embedding integrated with the attention mechanism based on transfer learning for classification (MCGAEc), which can efficiently extract the distinct modality information at various scales using the distinct color spaces. In this work, we first introduce the modality-specific multiscale color space encoder model, which includes diverse feature representations by integrating distinct characteristic color spaces on a multiscale into a unified framework. The extracted features from the prior encoder module are incorporated with the attention mechanism to extract the global features representation, which is integrated with the prior extracted features and transferred to the random forest classifier for the classification of AMD. To analyze the performance of the proposed MCGAEc method, a publicly available multi-modality dataset from Project Macula for AMD is utilized and compared with the existing models.
ReMOVE: A Reference-free Metric for Object Erasure
Authors: Aditya Chandrasekar, Goirik Chakrabarty, Jai Bardhan, Ramya Hebbalaguppe, Prathosh AP
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Object

We introduce $\texttt{ReMOVE}$, a novel reference-free metric for assessing object erasure efficacy in diffusion-based image editing models post-generation. Unlike existing measures such as LPIPS and CLIPScore, $\texttt{ReMOVE}$ addresses the challenge of evaluating inpainting without a reference image, common in practical scenarios. It effectively distinguishes between object removal and replacement. This is a key issue in diffusion models due to stochastic nature of image generation. Traditional metrics fail to align with the intuitive definition of inpainting, which aims for (1) seamless object removal within masked regions (2) while preserving the background continuity. $\texttt{ReMOVE}$ not only correlates with state-of-the-art metrics and aligns with human perception but also captures the nuanced aspects of the inpainting process, providing a finer-grained evaluation of the generated outputs.
Abstaining Machine Learning -- Philosophical Considerations
Authors: Daniela Schuster
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Philosophy

This paper establishes a connection between the fields of machine learning (ML) and philosophy concerning the phenomenon of behaving neutrally. It investigates a specific class of ML systems capable of delivering a neutral response to a given task, referred to as abstaining machine learning systems, that has not yet been studied from a philosophical perspective. The paper introduces and explains various abstaining machine learning systems, and categorizes them into distinct types. An examination is conducted on how abstention in the different machine learning system types aligns with the epistemological counterpart of suspended judgment, addressing both the nature of suspension and its normative profile. Additionally, a philosophical analysis is suggested on the autonomy and explainability of the abstaining response. It is argued, specifically, that one of the distinguished types of abstaining systems is preferable as it aligns more closely with our criteria for suspended judgment. Moreover, it is better equipped to autonomously generate abstaining outputs and offer explanations for abstaining outputs when compared to the other type.
Seeing Your Speech Style: A Novel Zero-Shot Identity-Disentanglement Face-based Voice Conversion
Authors: Yan Rong, Li Liu
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Disentanglement, Diversity, Voice Conversion

Face-based Voice Conversion (FVC) is a novel task that leverages facial images to generate the target speaker's voice style. Previous work has two shortcomings: (1) suffering from obtaining facial embeddings that are well-aligned with the speaker's voice identity information, and (2) inadequacy in decoupling content and speaker identity information from the audio input. To address these issues, we present a novel FVC method, Identity-Disentanglement Face-based Voice Conversion (ID-FaceVC), which overcomes the above two limitations. More precisely, we propose an Identity-Aware Query-based Contrastive Learning (IAQ-CL) module to extract speaker-specific facial features, and a Mutual Information-based Dual Decoupling (MIDD) module to purify content features from audio, ensuring clear and high-quality voice conversion. Besides, unlike prior works, our method can accept either audio or text inputs, offering controllable speech generation with adjustable emotional tone and speed. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ID-FaceVC achieves state-of-the-art performance across various metrics, with qualitative and user study results confirming its effectiveness in naturalness, similarity, and diversity. Project website with audio samples and code can be found at https://id-facevc.github.io.
Polyrating: A Cost-Effective and Bias-Aware Rating System for LLM Evaluation
Authors: Jasper Dekoninck, Maximilian Baader, Martin Vechev
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00

Rating-based human evaluation has become an essential tool to accurately evaluate the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs). However, current rating systems suffer from several important limitations: first, they fail to account for biases that significantly influence evaluation results, second, they require large and expensive preference datasets to obtain accurate ratings, and third, they do not facilitate meaningful comparisons of model ratings across different tasks. To address these issues, we introduce Polyrating, an expressive and flexible rating system based on maximum a posteriori estimation that enables a more nuanced and thorough analysis of model performance at lower costs. Polyrating can detect and quantify biases affecting human preferences, ensuring fairer model comparisons. Further, Polyrating can reduce the cost of human evaluations by up to $41\%$ for new models and up to $77\%$ for new tasks by leveraging existing benchmark scores. Lastly, Polyrating enables direct comparisons of ratings across different tasks, providing a comprehensive understanding of an LLMs' strengths, weaknesses, and relative performance across different applications.
Curriculum Prompting Foundation Models for Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Xiuqi Zheng, Yuhang Zhang, Haoran Zhang, Hongrui Liang, Xueqi Bao, Zhuqing Jiang, Qicheng Lao
Date: 2024-09-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Adapting large pre-trained foundation models, e.g., SAM, for medical image segmentation remains a significant challenge. A crucial step involves the formulation of a series of specialized prompts that incorporate specific clinical instructions. Past works have been heavily reliant on a singular type of prompt for each instance, necessitating manual input of an ideally correct prompt, which is less efficient. To tackle this issue, we propose to utilize prompts of different granularity, which are sourced from original images to provide a broader scope of clinical insights. However, combining prompts of varying types can pose a challenge due to potential conflicts. In response, we have designed a coarse-to-fine mechanism, referred to as curriculum prompting, that progressively integrates prompts of different types. Through extensive experiments on three public medical datasets across various modalities, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed approach, which not only automates the prompt generation process but also yields superior performance compared to other SAM-based medical image segmentation methods. Code is available at: https://github.com/AnnaZzz-zxq/Curriculum-Prompting.