pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Robust off-policy Reinforcement Learning via Soft Constrained Adversary
Authors: Kosuke Nakanishi, Akihiro Kubo, Yuji Yasui, Shin Ishii
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recently, robust reinforcement learning (RL) methods against input observation have garnered significant attention and undergone rapid evolution due to RL's potential vulnerability. Although these advanced methods have achieved reasonable success, there have been two limitations when considering adversary in terms of long-term horizons. First, the mutual dependency between the policy and its corresponding optimal adversary limits the development of off-policy RL algorithms; although obtaining optimal adversary should depend on the current policy, this has restricted applications to off-policy RL. Second, these methods generally assume perturbations based only on the $L_p$-norm, even when prior knowledge of the perturbation distribution in the environment is available. We here introduce another perspective on adversarial RL: an f-divergence constrained problem with the prior knowledge distribution. From this, we derive two typical attacks and their corresponding robust learning frameworks. The evaluation of robustness is conducted and the results demonstrate that our proposed methods achieve excellent performance in sample-efficient off-policy RL.
Density Adaptive Attention-based Speech Network: Enhancing Feature Understanding for Mental Health Disorders
Authors: Georgios Ioannides, Adrian Kieback, Aman Chadha, Aaron Elkins
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Depression Detection, Diagnostic, Explainable Models

Speech-based depression detection poses significant challenges for automated detection due to its unique manifestation across individuals and data scarcity. Addressing these challenges, we introduce DAAMAudioCNNLSTM and DAAMAudioTransformer, two parameter efficient and explainable models for audio feature extraction and depression detection. DAAMAudioCNNLSTM features a novel CNN-LSTM framework with multi-head Density Adaptive Attention Mechanism (DAAM), focusing dynamically on informative speech segments. DAAMAudioTransformer, leveraging a transformer encoder in place of the CNN-LSTM architecture, incorporates the same DAAM module for enhanced attention and interpretability. These approaches not only enhance detection robustness and interpretability but also achieve state-of-the-art performance: DAAMAudioCNNLSTM with an F1 macro score of 0.702 and DAAMAudioTransformer with an F1 macro score of 0.72 on the DAIC-WOZ dataset, without reliance on supplementary information such as vowel positions and speaker information during training/validation as in previous approaches. Both models' significant explainability and efficiency in leveraging speech signals for depression detection represent a leap towards more reliable, clinically useful diagnostic tools, promising advancements in speech and mental health care. To foster further research in this domain, we make our code publicly available.
Predicting Femicide in Veracruz: A Fuzzy Logic Approach with the Expanded MFM-FEM-VER-CP-2024 Model
Authors: Carlos Medel-Ramírez, Hilario Medel-López
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00

The article focuses on the urgent issue of femicide in Veracruz, Mexico, and the development of the MFM_FEM_VER_CP_2024 model, a mathematical framework designed to predict femicide risk using fuzzy logic. This model addresses the complexity and uncertainty inherent in gender based violence by formalizing risk factors such as coercive control, dehumanization, and the cycle of violence. These factors are mathematically modeled through membership functions that assess the degree of risk associated with various conditions, including personal relationships and specific acts of violence. The study enhances the original model by incorporating new rules and refining existing membership functions, which significantly improve the model predictive accuracy.
Predicting the Target Word of Game-playing Conversations using a Low-Rank Dialect Adapter for Decoder Models
Authors: Dipankar Srirag, Aditya Joshi, Jacob Eisenstein
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Decoder, Word Similarity

Dialect adapters that improve the performance of LLMs for NLU tasks on certain sociolects/dialects/national varieties ('dialects' for the sake of brevity) have been reported for encoder models. In this paper, we extend the idea of dialect adapters to decoder models in our architecture called LoRDD. Using MD-3, a publicly available dataset of word game-playing conversations between dialectal speakers, our task is Target Word Prediction (TWP) from a masked conversation. LoRDD combines task adapters and dialect adapters where the latter employ contrastive learning on pseudo-parallel conversations from MD-3. Our experiments on Indian English and Nigerian English conversations with two models (Mistral and Gemma) demonstrate that LoRDD outperforms four baselines on TWP. Additionally, it significantly reduces the performance gap with American English, narrowing it to 12% and 5.8% for word similarity, and 25% and 4.5% for accuracy, respectively. The focused contribution of LoRDD is in its promise for dialect adaptation of decoder models using TWP, a simplified version of the commonly used next-word prediction task.
Contrastive Augmentation: An Unsupervised Learning Approach for Keyword Spotting in Speech Technology
Authors: Weinan Dai, Yifeng Jiang, Yuanjing Liu, Jinkun Chen, Xin Sun, Jinglei Tao
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Keyword Spotting

This paper addresses the persistent challenge in Keyword Spotting (KWS), a fundamental component in speech technology, regarding the acquisition of substantial labeled data for training. Given the difficulty in obtaining large quantities of positive samples and the laborious process of collecting new target samples when the keyword changes, we introduce a novel approach combining unsupervised contrastive learning and a unique augmentation-based technique. Our method allows the neural network to train on unlabeled data sets, potentially improving performance in downstream tasks with limited labeled data sets. We also propose that similar high-level feature representations should be employed for speech utterances with the same keyword despite variations in speed or volume. To achieve this, we present a speech augmentation-based unsupervised learning method that utilizes the similarity between the bottleneck layer feature and the audio reconstructing information for auxiliary training. Furthermore, we propose a compressed convolutional architecture to address potential redundancy and non-informative information in KWS tasks, enabling the model to simultaneously learn local features and focus on long-term information. This method achieves strong performance on the Google Speech Commands V2 Dataset. Inspired by recent advancements in sign spotting and spoken term detection, our method underlines the potential of our contrastive learning approach in KWS and the advantages of Query-by-Example Spoken Term Detection strategies. The presented CAB-KWS provide new perspectives in the field of KWS, demonstrating effective ways to reduce data collection efforts and increase the system's robustness.
TSO: Self-Training with Scaled Preference Optimization
Authors: Kaihui Chen, Hao Yi, Qingyang Li, Tianyu Qi, Yulan Hu, Fuzheng Zhang, Yong liu
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Enhancing the conformity of large language models (LLMs) to human preferences remains an ongoing research challenge. Recently, offline approaches such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have gained prominence as attractive options due to offering effective improvement in simple, efficient, and stable without interactions with reward models. However, these offline preference optimization methods highly rely on the quality of pairwise preference samples. Meanwhile, numerous iterative methods require additional training of reward models to select positive and negative samples from the model's own generated responses for preference learning. Furthermore, as LLMs' capabilities advance, it is quite challenging to continuously construct high-quality positive and negative preference instances from the model's outputs due to the lack of diversity. To tackle these challenges, we propose TSO, or Self-Training with Scaled Preference Optimization, a framework for preference optimization that conducts self-training preference learning without training an additional reward model. TSO enhances the diversity of responses by constructing a model matrix and incorporating human preference responses. Furthermore, TSO introduces corrections for model preference errors through human and AI feedback. Finally, TSO adopts iterative and dual clip reward strategies to update the reference model and its responses, adaptively adjusting preference data and balancing the optimization process. Experimental results demonstrate that TSO outperforms existing mainstream methods on various alignment evaluation benchmarks, providing practical insight into preference data construction and model training strategies in the alignment domain.
GSpect: Spectral Filtering for Cross-Scale Graph Classification
Authors: XiaoYu Zhang, Wenchuan Yang, Jiawei Feng, Bitao Dai, Tianci Bu, Xin Lu
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Graph Classification

Identifying structures in common forms the basis for networked systems design and optimization. However, real structures represented by graphs are often of varying sizes, leading to the low accuracy of traditional graph classification methods. These graphs are called cross-scale graphs. To overcome this limitation, in this study, we propose GSpect, an advanced spectral graph filtering model for cross-scale graph classification tasks. Compared with other methods, we use graph wavelet neural networks for the convolution layer of the model, which aggregates multi-scale messages to generate graph representations. We design a spectral-pooling layer which aggregates nodes to one node to reduce the cross-scale graphs to the same size. We collect and construct the cross-scale benchmark data set, MSG (Multi Scale Graphs). Experiments reveal that, on open data sets, GSpect improves the performance of classification accuracy by 1.62% on average, and for a maximum of 3.33% on PROTEINS. On MSG, GSpect improves the performance of classification accuracy by 15.55% on average. GSpect fills the gap in cross-scale graph classification studies and has potential to provide assistance in application research like diagnosis of brain disease by predicting the brain network's label and developing new drugs with molecular structures learned from their counterparts in other systems.
Evaluating the Effectiveness of Large Language Models in Representing and Understanding Movement Trajectories
Authors: Yuhan Ji, Song Gao
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping

This research focuses on assessing the ability of AI foundation models in representing the trajectories of movements. We utilize one of the large language models (LLMs) (i.e., GPT-J) to encode the string format of trajectories and then evaluate the effectiveness of the LLM-based representation for trajectory data analysis. The experiments demonstrate that while the LLM-based embeddings can preserve certain trajectory distance metrics (i.e., the correlation coefficients exceed 0.74 between the Cosine distance derived from GPT-J embeddings and the Hausdorff and Dynamic Time Warping distances on raw trajectories), challenges remain in restoring numeric values and retrieving spatial neighbors in movement trajectory analytics. In addition, the LLMs can understand the spatiotemporal dependency contained in trajectories and have good accuracy in location prediction tasks. This research highlights the need for improvement in terms of capturing the nuances and complexities of the underlying geospatial data and integrating domain knowledge to support various GeoAI applications using LLMs.
WikiCausal: Corpus and Evaluation Framework for Causal Knowledge Graph Construction
Authors: Oktie Hassanzadeh
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles, graph construction, Knowledge Graphs, Question Answering

Recently, there has been an increasing interest in the construction of general-domain and domain-specific causal knowledge graphs. Such knowledge graphs enable reasoning for causal analysis and event prediction, and so have a range of applications across different domains. While great progress has been made toward automated construction of causal knowledge graphs, the evaluation of such solutions has either focused on low-level tasks (e.g., cause-effect phrase extraction) or on ad hoc evaluation data and small manual evaluations. In this paper, we present a corpus, task, and evaluation framework for causal knowledge graph construction. Our corpus consists of Wikipedia articles for a collection of event-related concepts in Wikidata. The task is to extract causal relations between event concepts from the corpus. The evaluation is performed in part using existing causal relations in Wikidata to measure recall, and in part using Large Language Models to avoid the need for manual or crowd-sourced evaluation. We evaluate a pipeline for causal knowledge graph construction that relies on neural models for question answering and concept linking, and show how the corpus and the evaluation framework allow us to effectively find the right model for each task. The corpus and the evaluation framework are publicly available.
Demo: FedCampus: A Real-world Privacy-preserving Mobile Application for Smart Campus via Federated Learning & Analytics
Authors: Jiaxiang Geng, Beilong Tang, Boyan Zhang, Jiaqi Shao, Bing Luo
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Privacy Preserving

In this demo, we introduce FedCampus, a privacy-preserving mobile application for smart \underline{campus} with \underline{fed}erated learning (FL) and federated analytics (FA). FedCampus enables cross-platform on-device FL/FA for both iOS and Android, supporting continuously models and algorithms deployment (MLOps). Our app integrates privacy-preserving processed data via differential privacy (DP) from smartwatches, where the processed parameters are used for FL/FA through the FedCampus backend platform. We distributed 100 smartwatches to volunteers at Duke Kunshan University and have successfully completed a series of smart campus tasks featuring capabilities such as sleep tracking, physical activity monitoring, personalized recommendations, and heavy hitters. Our project is opensourced at https://github.com/FedCampus/FedCampus_Flutter. See the FedCampus video at https://youtu.be/k5iu46IjA38.
Toward a More Complete OMR Solution
Authors: Guang Yang, Muru Zhang, Lin Qiu, Yanming Wan, Noah A. Smith
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Optical music recognition (OMR) aims to convert music notation into digital formats. One approach to tackle OMR is through a multi-stage pipeline, where the system first detects visual music notation elements in the image (object detection) and then assembles them into a music notation (notation assembly). Most previous work on notation assembly unrealistically assumes perfect object detection. In this study, we focus on the MUSCIMA++ v2.0 dataset, which represents musical notation as a graph with pairwise relationships among detected music objects, and we consider both stages together. First, we introduce a music object detector based on YOLOv8, which improves detection performance. Second, we introduce a supervised training pipeline that completes the notation assembly stage based on detection output. We find that this model is able to outperform existing models trained on perfect detection output, showing the benefit of considering the detection and assembly stages in a more holistic way. These findings, together with our novel evaluation metric, are important steps toward a more complete OMR solution.
An Empirical Study on Context Length for Open-Domain Dialog Generation
Authors: Xinyi Shen, Zuoquan Lin
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Open-Domain Dialog

Transformer-based open-domain dialog models have become increasingly popular in recent years. These models typically represent context as a concatenation of a dialog history. However, there is no criterion to decide how many utterances should be kept adequate in a context. We try to figure out how the choice of context length affects the model. We experiment on three questions from coarse to fine: (i) Does longer context help model training? (ii) Is it necessary to change the training context length when dealing with dialogs of different context lengths? (iii) Do different dialog samples have the same preference for context length? Our experimental results show that context length, an often overlooked setting, deserves attention when implementing Transformer-based dialog models.
Objective Features Extracted from Motor Activity Time Series for Food Addiction Analysis Using Machine Learning
Authors: Mikhail Borisenkov, Andrei Velichko, Maksim Belyaev, Dmitry Korzun, Tatyana Tserne, Larisa Bakutova, Denis Gubin
Date: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

This study investigates machine learning algorithms to identify objective features for diagnosing food addiction (FA) and assessing confirmed symptoms (SC). Data were collected from 81 participants (mean age: 21.5 years, range: 18-61 years, women: 77.8%) whose FA and SC were measured using the Yale Food Addiction Scale (YFAS). Participants provided demographic and anthropometric data, completed the YFAS, the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale, and the Dutch Eating Behavior Questionnaire, and wore an actimeter on the non-dominant wrist for a week to record motor activity. Analysis of the actimetric data identified significant statistical and entropy-based features that accurately predicted FA and SC using ML. The Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) was the primary metric. Activity-related features were more effective for FA prediction (MCC=0.88) than rest-related features (MCC=0.68). For SC, activity segments yielded MCC=0.47, rest segments MCC=0.38, and their combination MCC=0.51. Significant correlations were also found between actimetric features related to FA, emotional, and restrained eating behaviors, supporting the model's validity. Our results support the concept of a human bionic suite composed of IoT devices and ML sensors, which implements health digital assistance with real-time monitoring and analysis of physiological indicators related to FA and SC.
Quantum Machine Learning for Anomaly Detection in Consumer Electronics
Authors: Sounak Bhowmik, Himanshu Thapliyal
Date: 2024-08-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Quantum Machine Learning

Anomaly detection is a crucial task in cyber security. Technological advancement brings new cyber-physical threats like network intrusion, financial fraud, identity theft, and property invasion. In the rapidly changing world, with frequently emerging new types of anomalies, classical machine learning models are insufficient to prevent all the threats. Quantum Machine Learning (QML) is emerging as a powerful computational tool that can detect anomalies more efficiently. In this work, we have introduced QML and its applications for anomaly detection in consumer electronics. We have shown a generic framework for applying QML algorithms in anomaly detection tasks. We have also briefly discussed popular supervised, unsupervised, and reinforcement learning-based QML algorithms and included five case studies of recent works to show their applications in anomaly detection in the consumer electronics field.
HiPrompt: Tuning-free Higher-Resolution Generation with Hierarchical MLLM Prompts
Authors: Xinyu Liu, Yingqing He, Lanqing Guo, Xiang Li, Bu Jin, Peng Li, Yan Li, Chi-Min Chan, Qifeng Chen, Wei Xue, Wenhan Luo, Qifeng Liu, Yike Guo
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Denoising, Image Generation, Texture Synthesis

The potential for higher-resolution image generation using pretrained diffusion models is immense, yet these models often struggle with issues of object repetition and structural artifacts especially when scaling to 4K resolution and higher. We figure out that the problem is caused by that, a single prompt for the generation of multiple scales provides insufficient efficacy. In response, we propose HiPrompt, a new tuning-free solution that tackles the above problems by introducing hierarchical prompts. The hierarchical prompts offer both global and local guidance. Specifically, the global guidance comes from the user input that describes the overall content, while the local guidance utilizes patch-wise descriptions from MLLMs to elaborately guide the regional structure and texture generation. Furthermore, during the inverse denoising process, the generated noise is decomposed into low- and high-frequency spatial components. These components are conditioned on multiple prompt levels, including detailed patch-wise descriptions and broader image-level prompts, facilitating prompt-guided denoising under hierarchical semantic guidance. It further allows the generation to focus more on local spatial regions and ensures the generated images maintain coherent local and global semantics, structures, and textures with high definition. Extensive experiments demonstrate that HiPrompt outperforms state-of-the-art works in higher-resolution image generation, significantly reducing object repetition and enhancing structural quality.
Can LVLMs Obtain a Driver's License? A Benchmark Towards Reliable AGI for Autonomous Driving
Authors: Yuhang Lu, Yichen Yao, Jiadong Tu, Jiangnan Shao, Yuexin Ma, Xinge Zhu
Date: 2024-09-04 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, Decision Making, General Knowledge, Scene Understanding

Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have recently garnered significant attention, with many efforts aimed at harnessing their general knowledge to enhance the interpretability and robustness of autonomous driving models. However, LVLMs typically rely on large, general-purpose datasets and lack the specialized expertise required for professional and safe driving. Existing vision-language driving datasets focus primarily on scene understanding and decision-making, without providing explicit guidance on traffic rules and driving skills, which are critical aspects directly related to driving safety. To bridge this gap, we propose IDKB, a large-scale dataset containing over one million data items collected from various countries, including driving handbooks, theory test data, and simulated road test data. Much like the process of obtaining a driver's license, IDKB encompasses nearly all the explicit knowledge needed for driving from theory to practice. In particular, we conducted comprehensive tests on 15 LVLMs using IDKB to assess their reliability in the context of autonomous driving and provided extensive analysis. We also fine-tuned popular models, achieving notable performance improvements, which further validate the significance of our dataset. The project page can be found at: \url{https://4dvlab.github.io/project_page/idkb.html}