pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
HaSPeR: An Image Repository for Hand Shadow Puppet Recognition
Authors: Syed Rifat Raiyan, Zibran Zarif Amio, Sabbir Ahmed
Date: 2024-08-19 00:00:00
Tasks: image-classification, Image Classification

Hand shadow puppetry, also known as shadowgraphy or ombromanie, is a form of theatrical art and storytelling where hand shadows are projected onto flat surfaces to create illusions of living creatures. The skilled performers create these silhouettes by hand positioning, finger movements, and dexterous gestures to resemble shadows of animals and objects. Due to the lack of practitioners and a seismic shift in people's entertainment standards, this art form is on the verge of extinction. To facilitate its preservation and proliferate it to a wider audience, we introduce ${\rm H{\small A}SP{\small E}R}$, a novel dataset consisting of 15,000 images of hand shadow puppets across 15 classes extracted from both professional and amateur hand shadow puppeteer clips. We provide a detailed statistical analysis of the dataset and employ a range of pretrained image classification models to establish baselines. Our findings show a substantial performance superiority of skip-connected convolutional models over attention-based transformer architectures. We also find that lightweight models, such as MobileNetV2, suited for mobile applications and embedded devices, perform comparatively well. We surmise that such low-latency architectures can be useful in developing ombromanie teaching tools, and we create a prototype application to explore this surmission. Keeping the best-performing model ResNet34 under the limelight, we conduct comprehensive feature-spatial, explainability, and error analyses to gain insights into its decision-making process. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first documented dataset and research endeavor to preserve this dying art for future generations, with computer vision approaches. Our code and data will be publicly available.
CrossFi: A Cross Domain Wi-Fi Sensing Framework Based on Siamese Network
Authors: Zijian Zhao, TingWei Chen, Zhijie Cai, Xiaoyang Li, Hang Li, Qimei Chen, Guangxu Zhu
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Action Classification, Action Classification (1-shot), Action Classification (zero-shot), Few-Shot Learning, Gesture Recognition, One-Shot Learning, Person Identification, Person Identification (1-shot), Person Identification (zero-shot), Zero-Shot Learning

In recent years, Wi-Fi sensing has garnered significant attention due to its numerous benefits, such as privacy protection, low cost, and penetration ability. Extensive research has been conducted in this field, focusing on areas such as gesture recognition, people identification, and fall detection. However, many data-driven methods encounter challenges related to domain shift, where the model fails to perform well in environments different from the training data. One major factor contributing to this issue is the limited availability of Wi-Fi sensing datasets, which makes models learn excessive irrelevant information and over-fit to the training set. Unfortunately, collecting large-scale Wi-Fi sensing datasets across diverse scenarios is a challenging task. To address this problem, we propose CrossFi, a siamese network-based approach that excels in both in-domain scenario and cross-domain scenario, including few-shot, zero-shot scenarios, and even works in few-shot new-class scenario where testing set contains new categories. The core component of CrossFi is a sample-similarity calculation network called CSi-Net, which improves the structure of the siamese network by using an attention mechanism to capture similarity information, instead of simply calculating the distance or cosine similarity. Based on it, we develop an extra Weight-Net that can generate a template for each class, so that our CrossFi can work in different scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that our CrossFi achieves state-of-the-art performance across various scenarios. In gesture recognition task, our CrossFi achieves an accuracy of 98.17% in in-domain scenario, 91.72% in one-shot cross-domain scenario, 64.81% in zero-shot cross-domain scenario, and 84.75% in one-shot new-class scenario. The code for our model is publicly available at https://github.com/RS2002/CrossFi.
UIE-UnFold: Deep Unfolding Network with Color Priors and Vision Transformer for Underwater Image Enhancement
Authors: Yingtie Lei, JIA YU, Yihang Dong, Changwei Gong, Ziyang Zhou, Chi-Man Pun
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, UIE, Underwater Image Restoration

Underwater image enhancement (UIE) plays a crucial role in various marine applications, but it remains challenging due to the complex underwater environment. Current learning-based approaches frequently lack explicit incorporation of prior knowledge about the physical processes involved in underwater image formation, resulting in limited optimization despite their impressive enhancement results. This paper proposes a novel deep unfolding network (DUN) for UIE that integrates color priors and inter-stage feature transformation to improve enhancement performance. The proposed DUN model combines the iterative optimization and reliability of model-based methods with the flexibility and representational power of deep learning, offering a more explainable and stable solution compared to existing learning-based UIE approaches. The proposed model consists of three key components: a Color Prior Guidance Block (CPGB) that establishes a mapping between color channels of degraded and original images, a Nonlinear Activation Gradient Descent Module (NAGDM) that simulates the underwater image degradation process, and an Inter Stage Feature Transformer (ISF-Former) that facilitates feature exchange between different network stages. By explicitly incorporating color priors and modeling the physical characteristics of underwater image formation, the proposed DUN model achieves more accurate and reliable enhancement results. Extensive experiments on multiple underwater image datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed model over state-of-the-art methods in both quantitative and qualitative evaluations. The proposed DUN-based approach offers a promising solution for UIE, enabling more accurate and reliable scientific analysis in marine research. The code is available at https://github.com/CXH-Research/UIE-UnFold.
Near, far: Patch-ordering enhances vision foundation models' scene understanding
Authors: Valentinos Pariza, Mohammadreza Salehi, Gertjan Burghouts, Francesco Locatello, Yuki M. Asano
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Scene Understanding, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

We introduce NeCo: Patch Neighbor Consistency, a novel self-supervised training loss that enforces patch-level nearest neighbor consistency across a student and teacher model. Compared to contrastive approaches that only yield binary learning signals, i.e., 'attract' and 'repel', this approach benefits from the more fine-grained learning signal of sorting spatially dense features relative to reference patches. Our method leverages differentiable sorting applied on top of pretrained representations, such as DINOv2-registers to bootstrap the learning signal and further improve upon them. This dense post-pretraining leads to superior performance across various models and datasets, despite requiring only 19 hours on a single GPU. This method generates high-quality dense feature encoders and establishes several new state-of-the-art results such as +5.5% and +6% for non-parametric in-context semantic segmentation on ADE20k and Pascal VOC, +7.2% and +5.7% for linear segmentation evaluations on COCO-Things and -Stuff and improvements in the 3D understanding of multi-view consistency on SPair-71k, by more than 1.5%.
Revisiting VerilogEval: A Year of Improvements in Large-Language Models for Hardware Code Generation
Authors: Nathaniel Pinckney, Christopher Batten, Mingjie Liu, Haoxing Ren, Brucek Khailany
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Completion, Code Generation, In-Context Learning, Prompt Engineering

The application of large-language models (LLMs) to digital hardware code generation is an emerging field, with most LLMs primarily trained on natural language and software code. Hardware code like Verilog constitutes a small portion of training data, and few hardware benchmarks exist. The open-source VerilogEval benchmark, released in November 2023, provided a consistent evaluation framework for LLMs on code completion tasks. Since then, both commercial and open models have seen significant development. In this work, we evaluate new commercial and open models since VerilogEval's original release-including GPT-4o, GPT-4 Turbo, Llama3.1 (8B/70B/405B), Llama3 70B, Mistral Large, DeepSeek Coder (33B and 6.7B), CodeGemma 7B, and RTL-Coder-against an improved VerilogEval benchmark suite. We find measurable improvements in state-of-the-art models: GPT-4o achieves a 63% pass rate on specification-to-RTL tasks. The recently released and open Llama3.1 405B achieves a 58% pass rate, almost matching GPT-4o, while the smaller domain-specific RTL-Coder 6.7B models achieve an impressive 34% pass rate. Additionally, we enhance VerilogEval's infrastructure by automatically classifying failures, introducing in-context learning support, and extending the tasks to specification-to-RTL translation. We find that prompt engineering remains crucial for achieving good pass rates and varies widely with model and task. A benchmark infrastructure that allows for prompt engineering and failure analysis is essential for continued model development and deployment.
Accelerating Goal-Conditioned RL Algorithms and Research
Authors: Michał Bortkiewicz, Władysław Pałucki, Vivek Myers, Tadeusz Dziarmaga, Tomasz Arczewski, Łukasz Kuciński, Benjamin Eysenbach
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Self-Supervised Learning

Self-supervision has the potential to transform reinforcement learning (RL), paralleling the breakthroughs it has enabled in other areas of machine learning. While self-supervised learning in other domains aims to find patterns in a fixed dataset, self-supervised goal-conditioned reinforcement learning (GCRL) agents discover new behaviors by learning from the goals achieved during unstructured interaction with the environment. However, these methods have failed to see similar success, both due to a lack of data from slow environment simulations as well as a lack of stable algorithms. We take a step toward addressing both of these issues by releasing a high-performance codebase and benchmark (JaxGCRL) for self-supervised GCRL, enabling researchers to train agents for millions of environment steps in minutes on a single GPU. By utilizing GPU-accelerated replay buffers, environments, and a stable contrastive RL algorithm, we reduce training time by up to $22\times$. Additionally, we assess key design choices in contrastive RL, identifying those that most effectively stabilize and enhance training performance. With this approach, we provide a foundation for future research in self-supervised GCRL, enabling researchers to quickly iterate on new ideas and evaluate them in diverse and challenging environments. Website + Code: https://github.com/MichalBortkiewicz/JaxGCRL
FLAME: Learning to Navigate with Multimodal LLM in Urban Environments
Authors: Yunzhe Xu, Yiyuan Pan, Zhe Liu, Hesheng Wang
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Vision and Language Navigation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated potential in Vision-and-Language Navigation (VLN) tasks, yet current applications face challenges. While LLMs excel in general conversation scenarios, they struggle with specialized navigation tasks, yielding suboptimal performance compared to specialized VLN models. We introduce FLAME (FLAMingo-Architected Embodied Agent), a novel Multimodal LLM-based agent and architecture designed for urban VLN tasks that efficiently handles multiple observations. Our approach implements a three-phase tuning technique for effective adaptation to navigation tasks, including single perception tuning for street view description, multiple perception tuning for route summarization, and end-to-end training on VLN datasets. The augmented datasets are synthesized automatically. Experimental results demonstrate FLAME's superiority over existing methods, surpassing state-of-the-art methods by a 7.3% increase in task completion on Touchdown dataset. This work showcases the potential of Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) in complex navigation tasks, representing an advancement towards applications of MLLMs in the field of embodied intelligence.
RP1M: A Large-Scale Motion Dataset for Piano Playing with Bi-Manual Dexterous Robot Hands
Authors: Yi Zhao, Le Chen, Jan Schneider, Quankai Gao, Juho Kannala, Bernhard Schölkopf, Joni Pajarinen, Dieter Büchler
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Contact-rich Manipulation, Imitation Learning

It has been a long-standing research goal to endow robot hands with human-level dexterity. Bi-manual robot piano playing constitutes a task that combines challenges from dynamic tasks, such as generating fast while precise motions, with slower but contact-rich manipulation problems. Although reinforcement learning based approaches have shown promising results in single-task performance, these methods struggle in a multi-song setting. Our work aims to close this gap and, thereby, enable imitation learning approaches for robot piano playing at scale. To this end, we introduce the Robot Piano 1 Million (RP1M) dataset, containing bi-manual robot piano playing motion data of more than one million trajectories. We formulate finger placements as an optimal transport problem, thus, enabling automatic annotation of vast amounts of unlabeled songs. Benchmarking existing imitation learning approaches shows that such approaches reach state-of-the-art robot piano playing performance by leveraging RP1M.
Reconciling Methodological Paradigms: Employing Large Language Models as Novice Qualitative Research Assistants in Talent Management Research
Authors: Sreyoshi Bhaduri, Satya Kapoor, Alex Gil, Anshul Mittal, Rutu Mulkar
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, Management, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

Qualitative data collection and analysis approaches, such as those employing interviews and focus groups, provide rich insights into customer attitudes, sentiment, and behavior. However, manually analyzing qualitative data requires extensive time and effort to identify relevant topics and thematic insights. This study proposes a novel approach to address this challenge by leveraging Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) based Large Language Models (LLMs) for analyzing interview transcripts. The novelty of this work lies in strategizing the research inquiry as one that is augmented by an LLM that serves as a novice research assistant. This research explores the mental model of LLMs to serve as novice qualitative research assistants for researchers in the talent management space. A RAG-based LLM approach is extended to enable topic modeling of semi-structured interview data, showcasing the versatility of these models beyond their traditional use in information retrieval and search. Our findings demonstrate that the LLM-augmented RAG approach can successfully extract topics of interest, with significant coverage compared to manually generated topics from the same dataset. This establishes the viability of employing LLMs as novice qualitative research assistants. Additionally, the study recommends that researchers leveraging such models lean heavily on quality criteria used in traditional qualitative research to ensure rigor and trustworthiness of their approach. Finally, the paper presents key recommendations for industry practitioners seeking to reconcile the use of LLMs with established qualitative research paradigms, providing a roadmap for the effective integration of these powerful, albeit novice, AI tools in the analysis of qualitative datasets within talent
GraphFSA: A Finite State Automaton Framework for Algorithmic Learning on Graphs
Authors: Florian Grötschla, Joël Mathys, Christoffer Raun, Roger Wattenhofer
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00

Many graph algorithms can be viewed as sets of rules that are iteratively applied, with the number of iterations dependent on the size and complexity of the input graph. Existing machine learning architectures often struggle to represent these algorithmic decisions as discrete state transitions. Therefore, we propose a novel framework: GraphFSA (Graph Finite State Automaton). GraphFSA is designed to learn a finite state automaton that runs on each node of a given graph. We test GraphFSA on cellular automata problems, showcasing its abilities in a straightforward algorithmic setting. For a comprehensive empirical evaluation of our framework, we create a diverse range of synthetic problems. As our main application, we then focus on learning more elaborate graph algorithms. Our findings suggest that GraphFSA exhibits strong generalization and extrapolation abilities, presenting an alternative approach to represent these algorithms.
Transfusion: Predict the Next Token and Diffuse Images with One Multi-Modal Model
Authors: Chunting Zhou, Lili Yu, Arun Babu, Kushal Tirumala, Michihiro Yasunaga, Leonid Shamis, Jacob Kahn, Xuezhe Ma, Luke Zettlemoyer, Omer Levy
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling

We introduce Transfusion, a recipe for training a multi-modal model over discrete and continuous data. Transfusion combines the language modeling loss function (next token prediction) with diffusion to train a single transformer over mixed-modality sequences. We pretrain multiple Transfusion models up to 7B parameters from scratch on a mixture of text and image data, establishing scaling laws with respect to a variety of uni- and cross-modal benchmarks. Our experiments show that Transfusion scales significantly better than quantizing images and training a language model over discrete image tokens. By introducing modality-specific encoding and decoding layers, we can further improve the performance of Transfusion models, and even compress each image to just 16 patches. We further demonstrate that scaling our Transfusion recipe to 7B parameters and 2T multi-modal tokens produces a model that can generate images and text on a par with similar scale diffusion models and language models, reaping the benefits of both worlds.
Athena: Safe Autonomous Agents with Verbal Contrastive Learning
Authors: Tanmana Sadhu, Ali Pesaranghader, Yanan Chen, Dong Hoon Yi
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning

Due to emergent capabilities, large language models (LLMs) have been utilized as language-based agents to perform a variety of tasks and make decisions with an increasing degree of autonomy. These autonomous agents can understand high-level instructions, interact with their environments, and execute complex tasks using a selection of tools available to them. As the capabilities of the agents expand, ensuring their safety and trustworthiness becomes more imperative. In this study, we introduce the Athena framework which leverages the concept of verbal contrastive learning where past safe and unsafe trajectories are used as in-context (contrastive) examples to guide the agent towards safety while fulfilling a given task. The framework also incorporates a critiquing mechanism to guide the agent to prevent risky actions at every step. Furthermore, due to the lack of existing benchmarks on the safety reasoning ability of LLM-based agents, we curate a set of 80 toolkits across 8 categories with 180 scenarios to provide a safety evaluation benchmark. Our experimental evaluation, with both closed- and open-source LLMs, indicates verbal contrastive learning and interaction-level critiquing improve the safety rate significantly.
An Overlooked Role of Context-Sensitive Dendrites
Authors: Mohsin Raza, Ahsan Adeel
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00

To date, most dendritic studies have predominantly focused on the apical zone of pyramidal two-point neurons (TPNs) receiving only feedback (FB) connections from higher perceptual layers and using them for learning. Recent cellular neurophysiology and computational neuroscience studies suggests that the apical input (context), coming from feedback and lateral connections, is multifaceted and far more diverse, with greater implications for ongoing learning and processing in the brain than previously realized. In addition to the FB, the apical tuft receives signals from neighboring cells of the same network as proximal (P) context, other parts of the brain as distal (D) context, and overall coherent information across the network as universal (U) context. The integrated context (C) amplifies and suppresses the transmission of coherent and conflicting feedforward (FF) signals, respectively. Specifically, we show that complex context-sensitive (CS)-TPNs flexibly integrate C moment-by-moment with the FF somatic current at the soma such that the somatic current is amplified when both feedforward (FF) and C are coherent; otherwise, it is attenuated. This generates the event only when the FF and C currents are coherent, which is then translated into a singlet or a burst based on the FB information. Spiking simulation results show that this flexible integration of somatic and contextual currents enables the propagation of more coherent signals (bursts), making learning faster with fewer neurons. Similar behavior is observed when this functioning is used in conventional artificial networks, where orders of magnitude fewer neurons are required to process vast amounts of heterogeneous real-world audio-visual (AV) data trained using backpropagation (BP). The computational findings presented here demonstrate the universality of CS-TPNs, suggesting a dendritic narrative that was previously overlooked.
Multiwinner Temporal Voting with Aversion to Change
Authors: Valentin Zech, Niclas Boehmer, Edith Elkind, Nicholas Teh
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00

We study two-stage committee elections where voters have dynamic preferences over candidates; at each stage, a committee is chosen under a given voting rule. We are interested in identifying a winning committee for the second stage that overlaps as much as possible with the first-stage committee. We show a full complexity dichotomy for the class of Thiele rules: this problem is tractable for Approval Voting (AV) and hard for all other Thiele rules (including, in particular, Proportional Approval Voting and the Chamberlin-Courant rule). We extend this dichotomy to the greedy variants of Thiele rules. We also explore this problem from a parameterized complexity perspective for several natural parameters. We complement the theory with experimental analysis: e.g., we investigate the average number of changes in the committee as a function of changes in voters' preferences and the role of ties.