pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Query Augmentation by Decoding Semantics from Brain Signals
Authors: Ziyi Ye, Jingtao Zhan, Qingyao Ai, Yiqun Liu, Maarten de Rijke, Christina Lioma, Tuukka Ruotsalo
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Document Ranking

Query augmentation is a crucial technique for refining semantically imprecise queries. Traditionally, query augmentation relies on extracting information from initially retrieved, potentially relevant documents. If the quality of the initially retrieved documents is low, then the effectiveness of query augmentation would be limited as well. We propose Brain-Aug, which enhances a query by incorporating semantic information decoded from brain signals. BrainAug generates the continuation of the original query with a prompt constructed with brain signal information and a ranking-oriented inference approach. Experimental results on fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) datasets show that Brain-Aug produces semantically more accurate queries, leading to improved document ranking performance. Such improvement brought by brain signals is particularly notable for ambiguous queries.
Is Offline Decision Making Possible with Only Few Samples? Reliable Decisions in Data-Starved Bandits via Trust Region Enhancement
Authors: Ruiqi Zhang, Yuexiang Zhai, Andrea Zanette
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Multi-Armed Bandits

What can an agent learn in a stochastic Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) problem from a dataset that contains just a single sample for each arm? Surprisingly, in this work, we demonstrate that even in such a data-starved setting it may still be possible to find a policy competitive with the optimal one. This paves the way to reliable decision-making in settings where critical decisions must be made by relying only on a handful of samples. Our analysis reveals that \emph{stochastic policies can be substantially better} than deterministic ones for offline decision-making. Focusing on offline multi-armed bandits, we design an algorithm called Trust Region of Uncertainty for Stochastic policy enhancemenT (TRUST) which is quite different from the predominant value-based lower confidence bound approach. Its design is enabled by localization laws, critical radii, and relative pessimism. We prove that its sample complexity is comparable to that of LCB on minimax problems while being substantially lower on problems with very few samples. Finally, we consider an application to offline reinforcement learning in the special case where the logging policies are known.
CoRelation: Boosting Automatic ICD Coding Through Contextualized Code Relation Learning
Authors: Junyu Luo, Xiaochen Wang, Jiaqi Wang, Aofei Chang, Yaqing Wang, Fenglong Ma
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation

Automatic International Classification of Diseases (ICD) coding plays a crucial role in the extraction of relevant information from clinical notes for proper recording and billing. One of the most important directions for boosting the performance of automatic ICD coding is modeling ICD code relations. However, current methods insufficiently model the intricate relationships among ICD codes and often overlook the importance of context in clinical notes. In this paper, we propose a novel approach, a contextualized and flexible framework, to enhance the learning of ICD code representations. Our approach, unlike existing methods, employs a dependent learning paradigm that considers the context of clinical notes in modeling all possible code relations. We evaluate our approach on six public ICD coding datasets and the experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach compared to state-of-the-art baselines.
Foot In The Door: Understanding Large Language Model Jailbreaking via Cognitive Psychology
Authors: Zhenhua Wang, Wei Xie, Baosheng Wang, Enze Wang, Zhiwen Gui, Shuoyoucheng Ma, Kai Chen
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large Language Models (LLMs) have gradually become the gateway for people to acquire new knowledge. However, attackers can break the model's security protection ("jail") to access restricted information, which is called "jailbreaking." Previous studies have shown the weakness of current LLMs when confronted with such jailbreaking attacks. Nevertheless, comprehension of the intrinsic decision-making mechanism within the LLMs upon receipt of jailbreak prompts is noticeably lacking. Our research provides a psychological explanation of the jailbreak prompts. Drawing on cognitive consistency theory, we argue that the key to jailbreak is guiding the LLM to achieve cognitive coordination in an erroneous direction. Further, we propose an automatic black-box jailbreaking method based on the Foot-in-the-Door (FITD) technique. This method progressively induces the model to answer harmful questions via multi-step incremental prompts. We instantiated a prototype system to evaluate the jailbreaking effectiveness on 8 advanced LLMs, yielding an average success rate of 83.9%. This study builds a psychological perspective on the explanatory insights into the intrinsic decision-making logic of LLMs.
General Purpose Image Encoder DINOv2 for Medical Image Registration
Authors: Xinrui Song, Xuanang Xu, Pingkun Yan
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Registration, Medical Image Registration

Existing medical image registration algorithms rely on either dataset specific training or local texture-based features to align images. The former cannot be reliably implemented without large modality-specific training datasets, while the latter lacks global semantics thus could be easily trapped at local minima. In this paper, we present a training-free deformable image registration method, DINO-Reg, leveraging a general purpose image encoder DINOv2 for image feature extraction. The DINOv2 encoder was trained using the ImageNet data containing natural images. We used the pretrained DINOv2 without any finetuning. Our method feeds the DINOv2 encoded features into a discrete optimizer to find the optimal deformable registration field. We conducted a series of experiments to understand the behavior and role of such a general purpose image encoder in the application of image registration. Combined with handcrafted features, our method won the first place in the recent OncoReg Challenge. To our knowledge, this is the first application of general vision foundation models in medical image registration.
A mathematical model for simultaneous personnel shift planning and unrelated parallel machine scheduling
Authors: Maziyar Khadivi, Mostafa Abbasi, Todd Charter, Homayoun Najjaran
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Scheduling

This paper addresses a production scheduling problem derived from an industrial use case, focusing on unrelated parallel machine scheduling with the personnel availability constraint. The proposed model optimizes the production plan over a multi-period scheduling horizon, accommodating variations in personnel shift hours within each time period. It assumes shared personnel among machines, with one personnel required per machine for setup and supervision during job processing. Available personnel are fewer than the machines, thus limiting the number of machines that can operate in parallel. The model aims to minimize the total production time considering machine-dependent processing times and sequence-dependent setup times. The model handles practical scenarios like machine eligibility constraints and production time windows. A Mixed Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model is introduced to formulate the problem, taking into account both continuous and district variables. A two-step solution approach enhances computational speed, first maximizing accepted jobs and then minimizing production time. Validation with synthetic problem instances and a real industrial case study of a food processing plant demonstrates the performance of the model and its usefulness in personnel shift planning. The findings offer valuable insights for practical managerial decision-making in the context of production scheduling.
Universal Model in Online Customer Service
Authors: Shu-Ting Pi, Cheng-Ping Hsieh, Qun Liu, Yuying Zhu
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Information Retrieval, model, Retrieval, TAG

Building machine learning models can be a time-consuming process that often takes several months to implement in typical business scenarios. To ensure consistent model performance and account for variations in data distribution, regular retraining is necessary. This paper introduces a solution for improving online customer service in e-commerce by presenting a universal model for predict-ing labels based on customer questions, without requiring training. Our novel approach involves using machine learning techniques to tag customer questions in transcripts and create a repository of questions and corresponding labels. When a customer requests assistance, an information retrieval model searches the repository for similar questions, and statistical analysis is used to predict the corresponding label. By eliminating the need for individual model training and maintenance, our approach reduces both the model development cycle and costs. The repository only requires periodic updating to maintain accuracy.
Teacher-Student Learning on Complexity in Intelligent Routing
Authors: Shu-Ting Pi, Michael Yang, Yuying Zhu, Qun Liu
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00

Customer service is often the most time-consuming aspect for e-commerce websites, with each contact typically taking 10-15 minutes. Effectively routing customers to appropriate agents without transfers is therefore crucial for e-commerce success. To this end, we have developed a machine learning framework that predicts the complexity of customer contacts and routes them to appropriate agents accordingly. The framework consists of two parts. First, we train a teacher model to score the complexity of a contact based on the post-contact transcripts. Then, we use the teacher model as a data annotator to provide labels to train a student model that predicts the complexity based on pre-contact data only. Our experiments show that such a framework is successful and can significantly improve customer experience. We also propose a useful metric called complexity AUC that evaluates the effectiveness of customer service at a statistical level.
GiMeFive: Towards Interpretable Facial Emotion Classification
Authors: Jiawen Wang, Leah Kawka
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Emotion Classification, Emotion Recognition, Facial Emotion Recognition

Deep convolutional neural networks have been shown to successfully recognize facial emotions for the past years in the realm of computer vision. However, the existing detection approaches are not always reliable or explainable, we here propose our model GiMeFive with interpretations, i.e., via layer activations and gradient-weighted class activation mapping. We compare against the state-of-the-art methods to classify the six facial emotions. Empirical results show that our model outperforms the previous methods in terms of accuracy on two Facial Emotion Recognition (FER) benchmarks and our aggregated FER GiMeFive. Furthermore, we explain our work in real-world image and video examples, as well as real-time live camera streams. Our code and supplementary material are available at https: //github.com/werywjw/SEP-CVDL.
Learning Semilinear Neural Operators : A Unified Recursive Framework For Prediction And Data Assimilation
Authors: Ashutosh Singh, Ricardo Augusto Borsoi, Deniz Erdogmus, Tales Imbiriba
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00

Recent advances in the theory of Neural Operators (NOs) have enabled fast and accurate computation of the solutions to complex systems described by partial differential equations (PDEs). Despite their great success, current NO-based solutions face important challenges when dealing with spatio-temporal PDEs over long time scales. Specifically, the current theory of NOs does not present a systematic framework to perform data assimilation and efficiently correct the evolution of PDE solutions over time based on sparsely sampled noisy measurements. In this paper, we propose a learning-based state-space approach to compute the solution operators to infinite-dimensional semilinear PDEs. Exploiting the structure of semilinear PDEs and the theory of nonlinear observers in function spaces, we develop a flexible recursive method that allows for both prediction and data assimilation by combining prediction and correction operations. The proposed framework is capable of producing fast and accurate predictions over long time horizons, dealing with irregularly sampled noisy measurements to correct the solution, and benefits from the decoupling between the spatial and temporal dynamics of this class of PDEs. We show through experiments on the Kuramoto-Sivashinsky, Navier-Stokes and Korteweg-de Vries equations that the proposed model is robust to noise and can leverage arbitrary amounts of measurements to correct its prediction over a long time horizon with little computational overhead.
Contact Complexity in Customer Service
Authors: Shu-Ting Pi, Michael Yang, Qun Liu
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00

Customers who reach out for customer service support may face a range of issues that vary in complexity. Routing high-complexity contacts to junior agents can lead to multiple transfers or repeated contacts, while directing low-complexity contacts to senior agents can strain their capacity to assist customers who need professional help. To tackle this, a machine learning model that accurately predicts the complexity of customer issues is highly desirable. However, defining the complexity of a contact is a difficult task as it is a highly abstract concept. While consensus-based data annotation by experienced agents is a possible solution, it is time-consuming and costly. To overcome these challenges, we have developed a novel machine learning approach to define contact complexity. Instead of relying on human annotation, we trained an AI expert model to mimic the behavior of agents and evaluate each contact's complexity based on how the AI expert responds. If the AI expert is uncertain or lacks the skills to comprehend the contact transcript, it is considered a high-complexity contact. Our method has proven to be reliable, scalable, and cost-effective based on the collected data.
Uniformly Safe RL with Objective Suppression for Multi-Constraint Safety-Critical Applications
Authors: Zihan Zhou, Jonathan Booher, Khashayar Rohanimanesh, Wei Liu, Aleksandr Petiushko, Animesh Garg
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Driving, reinforcement-learning, Safe Reinforcement Learning

Safe reinforcement learning tasks are a challenging domain despite being very common in the real world. The widely adopted CMDP model constrains the risks in expectation, which makes room for dangerous behaviors in long-tail states. In safety-critical domains, such behaviors could lead to disastrous outcomes. To address this issue, we first describe the problem with a stronger Uniformly Constrained MDP (UCMDP) model where we impose constraints on all reachable states; we then propose Objective Suppression, a novel method that adaptively suppresses the task reward maximizing objectives according to a safety critic, as a solution to the Lagrangian dual of a UCMDP. We benchmark Objective Suppression in two multi-constraint safety domains, including an autonomous driving domain where any incorrect behavior can lead to disastrous consequences. On the driving domain, we evaluate on open source and proprietary data and evaluate transfer to a real autonomous fleet. Empirically, we demonstrate that our proposed method, when combined with existing safe RL algorithms, can match the task reward achieved by baselines with significantly fewer constraint violations.
Fine-Grained Self-Endorsement Improves Factuality and Reasoning
Authors: Ante Wang, Linfeng Song, Baolin Peng, Ye Tian, Lifeng Jin, Haitao Mi, Jinsong Su, Dong Yu
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, TriviaQA

This work studies improving large language model (LLM) generations at inference time by mitigating fact-conflicting hallucinations. Particularly, we propose a self-endorsement framework that leverages the fine-grained fact-level comparisons across multiple sampled responses. Compared with prior ensemble methods (Wang et al., 2022;Chen et al., 2023)) that perform response-level selection, our approach can better alleviate hallucinations, especially for longform generation tasks. Our approach can broadly benefit smaller and open-source LLMs as it mainly conducts simple content-based comparisons. Experiments on Biographies show that our method can effectively improve the factuality of generations with simple and intuitive prompts across different scales of LLMs. Besides, comprehensive analyses on TriviaQA and GSM8K demonstrate the potential of self-endorsement for broader application.
Learning Cyclic Causal Models from Incomplete Data
Authors: Muralikrishnna G. Sethuraman, Faramarz Fekri
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Discovery, Imputation

Causal learning is a fundamental problem in statistics and science, offering insights into predicting the effects of unseen treatments on a system. Despite recent advances in this topic, most existing causal discovery algorithms operate under two key assumptions: (i) the underlying graph is acyclic, and (ii) the available data is complete. These assumptions can be problematic as many real-world systems contain feedback loops (e.g., biological systems), and practical scenarios frequently involve missing data. In this work, we propose a novel framework, named MissNODAGS, for learning cyclic causal graphs from partially missing data. Under the additive noise model, MissNODAGS learns the causal graph by alternating between imputing the missing data and maximizing the expected log-likelihood of the visible part of the data in each training step, following the principles of the expectation-maximization (EM) framework. Through synthetic experiments and real-world single-cell perturbation data, we demonstrate improved performance when compared to using state-of-the-art imputation techniques followed by causal learning on partially missing interventional data.
RecWizard: A Toolkit for Conversational Recommendation with Modular, Portable Models and Interactive User Interface
Authors: Zeyuan Zhang, Tanmay Laud, Zihang He, Xiaojie Chen, Xinshuang Liu, Zhouhang Xie, Julian McAuley, Zhankui He
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Conversational Recommendation, Recommendation Systems

We present a new Python toolkit called RecWizard for Conversational Recommender Systems (CRS). RecWizard offers support for development of models and interactive user interface, drawing from the best practices of the Huggingface ecosystems. CRS with RecWizard are modular, portable, interactive and Large Language Models (LLMs)-friendly, to streamline the learning process and reduce the additional effort for CRS research. For more comprehensive information about RecWizard, please check our GitHub https://github.com/McAuley-Lab/RecWizard.
LLMs as Meta-Reviewers' Assistants: A Case Study
Authors: Eftekhar Hossain, Sanjeev Kumar Sinha, Naman Bansal, Alex Knipper, Souvika Sarkar, John Salvador, Yash Mahajan, Sri Guttikonda, Mousumi Akter, Md. Mahadi Hassan, Matthew Freestone, Matthew C. Williams Jr., Dongji Feng, Santu Karmaker
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00

One of the most important yet onerous tasks in the academic peer-reviewing process is composing meta-reviews, which involves assimilating diverse opinions from multiple expert peers, formulating one's self-judgment as a senior expert, and then summarizing all these perspectives into a concise holistic overview to make an overall recommendation. This process is time-consuming and can be compromised by human factors like fatigue, inconsistency, missing tiny details, etc. Given the latest major developments in Large Language Models (LLMs), it is very compelling to rigorously study whether LLMs can help metareviewers perform this important task better. In this paper, we perform a case study with three popular LLMs, i.e., GPT-3.5, LLaMA2, and PaLM2, to assist meta-reviewers in better comprehending multiple experts perspectives by generating a controlled multi-perspective summary (MPS) of their opinions. To achieve this, we prompt three LLMs with different types/levels of prompts based on the recently proposed TELeR taxonomy. Finally, we perform a detailed qualitative study of the MPSs generated by the LLMs and report our findings.
Improving Explainable Object-induced Model through Uncertainty for Automated Vehicles
Authors: Shihong Ling, Yue Wan, Xiaowei Jia, Na Du
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

The rapid evolution of automated vehicles (AVs) has the potential to provide safer, more efficient, and comfortable travel options. However, these systems face challenges regarding reliability in complex driving scenarios. Recent explainable AV architectures neglect crucial information related to inherent uncertainties while providing explanations for actions. To overcome such challenges, our study builds upon the "object-induced" model approach that prioritizes the role of objects in scenes for decision-making and integrates uncertainty assessment into the decision-making process using an evidential deep learning paradigm with a Beta prior. Additionally, we explore several advanced training strategies guided by uncertainty, including uncertainty-guided data reweighting and augmentation. Leveraging the BDD-OIA dataset, our findings underscore that the model, through these enhancements, not only offers a clearer comprehension of AV decisions and their underlying reasoning but also surpasses existing baselines across a broad range of scenarios.
Fast Adversarial Attacks on Language Models In One GPU Minute
Authors: Vinu Sankar Sadasivan, Shoumik Saha, Gaurang Sriramanan, Priyatham Kattakinda, Atoosa Chegini, Soheil Feizi
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Adversarial Attack, Computational Efficiency, GPU

In this paper, we introduce a novel class of fast, beam search-based adversarial attack (BEAST) for Language Models (LMs). BEAST employs interpretable parameters, enabling attackers to balance between attack speed, success rate, and the readability of adversarial prompts. The computational efficiency of BEAST facilitates us to investigate its applications on LMs for jailbreaking, eliciting hallucinations, and privacy attacks. Our gradient-free targeted attack can jailbreak aligned LMs with high attack success rates within one minute. For instance, BEAST can jailbreak Vicuna-7B-v1.5 under one minute with a success rate of 89% when compared to a gradient-based baseline that takes over an hour to achieve 70% success rate using a single Nvidia RTX A6000 48GB GPU. Additionally, we discover a unique outcome wherein our untargeted attack induces hallucinations in LM chatbots. Through human evaluations, we find that our untargeted attack causes Vicuna-7B-v1.5 to produce ~15% more incorrect outputs when compared to LM outputs in the absence of our attack. We also learn that 22% of the time, BEAST causes Vicuna to generate outputs that are not relevant to the original prompt. Further, we use BEAST to generate adversarial prompts in a few seconds that can boost the performance of existing membership inference attacks for LMs. We believe that our fast attack, BEAST, has the potential to accelerate research in LM security and privacy. Our codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/vinusankars/BEAST.