pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Multistage Fine-tuning Strategies for Automatic Speech Recognition in Low-resource Languages
Authors: Leena G Pillai, Kavya Manohar, Basil K Raju, Elizabeth Sherly
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

This paper presents a novel multistage fine-tuning strategy designed to enhance automatic speech recognition (ASR) performance in low-resource languages using OpenAI's Whisper model. In this approach we aim to build ASR model for languages with limited digital resources by sequentially adapting the model across linguistically similar languages. We experimented this on the Malasar language, a Dravidian language spoken by approximately ten thousand people in the Western Ghats of South India. Malasar language faces critical challenges for technological intervention due to its lack of a native script and absence of digital or spoken data resources. Working in collaboration with Wycliffe India and Malasar community members, we created a spoken Malasar corpus paired with transcription in Tamil script, a closely related major language. In our approach to build ASR model for Malasar, we first build an intermediate Tamil ASR, leveraging higher data availability for Tamil annotated speech. This intermediate model is subsequently fine-tuned on Malasar data, allowing for more effective ASR adaptation despite limited resources. The multistage fine-tuning strategy demonstrated significant improvements over direct fine-tuning on Malasar data alone, achieving a word error rate (WER) of 51.9%, which is 4.5% absolute reduction when compared to the direct fine-tuning method. Further a WER reduction to 47.3% was achieved through punctuation removal in post-processing, which addresses formatting inconsistencies that impact evaluation. Our results underscore the effectiveness of sequential multistage fine-tuning combined with targeted post-processing as a scalable strategy for ASR system development in low-resource languages, especially where linguistic similarities can be leveraged to bridge gaps in training data.
Impact of Label Noise on Learning Complex Features
Authors: Rahul Vashisht, P. Krishna Kumar, Harsha Vardhan Govind, Harish G. Ramaswamy
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Inductive Bias

Neural networks trained with stochastic gradient descent exhibit an inductive bias towards simpler decision boundaries, typically converging to a narrow family of functions, and often fail to capture more complex features. This phenomenon raises concerns about the capacity of deep models to adequately learn and represent real-world datasets. Traditional approaches such as explicit regularization, data augmentation, architectural modifications, etc., have largely proven ineffective in encouraging the models to learn diverse features. In this work, we investigate the impact of pre-training models with noisy labels on the dynamics of SGD across various architectures and datasets. We show that pretraining promotes learning complex functions and diverse features in the presence of noise. Our experiments demonstrate that pre-training with noisy labels encourages gradient descent to find alternate minima that do not solely depend upon simple features, rather learns more complex and broader set of features, without hurting performance.
A Generalisation of Voter Model: Influential Nodes and Convergence Properties
Authors: Abhiram Manohara, Ahad N. Zehmakan
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00

Consider an undirected graph G, representing a social network, where each node is blue or red, corresponding to positive or negative opinion on a topic. In the voter model, in discrete time rounds, each node picks a neighbour uniformly at random and adopts its colour. Despite its significant popularity, this model does not capture some fundamental real-world characteristics such as the difference in the strengths of individuals connections, individuals with neutral opinion on a topic, and individuals who are reluctant to update their opinion. To address these issues, we introduce and study a generalisation of the voter model. Motivating by campaigning strategies, we study the problem of selecting a set of seeds blue nodes to maximise the expected number of blue nodes after some rounds. We prove that the problem is NP- hard and provide a polynomial time approximation algorithm with the best possible approximation guarantee. Our experiments on real-world and synthetic graph data demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms other algorithms. We also investigate the convergence properties of the model. We prove that the process could take an exponential number of rounds to converge. However, if we limit ourselves to strongly connected graphs, the convergence time is polynomial and the period (the number of states in convergence) divides the length of all cycles in the graph.
Constrained Latent Action Policies for Model-Based Offline Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Marvin Alles, Philip Becker-Ehmck, Patrick van der Smagt, Maximilian Karl
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: D4RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

In offline reinforcement learning, a policy is learned using a static dataset in the absence of costly feedback from the environment. In contrast to the online setting, only using static datasets poses additional challenges, such as policies generating out-of-distribution samples. Model-based offline reinforcement learning methods try to overcome these by learning a model of the underlying dynamics of the environment and using it to guide policy search. It is beneficial but, with limited datasets, errors in the model and the issue of value overestimation among out-of-distribution states can worsen performance. Current model-based methods apply some notion of conservatism to the Bellman update, often implemented using uncertainty estimation derived from model ensembles. In this paper, we propose Constrained Latent Action Policies (C-LAP) which learns a generative model of the joint distribution of observations and actions. We cast policy learning as a constrained objective to always stay within the support of the latent action distribution, and use the generative capabilities of the model to impose an implicit constraint on the generated actions. Thereby eliminating the need to use additional uncertainty penalties on the Bellman update and significantly decreasing the number of gradient steps required to learn a policy. We empirically evaluate C-LAP on the D4RL and V-D4RL benchmark, and show that C-LAP is competitive to state-of-the-art methods, especially outperforming on datasets with visual observations.
An Axiomatic Study of the Evaluation of Enthymeme Decoding in Weighted Structured Argumentation
Authors: Jonathan Ben-Naim, Victor David, Anthony Hunter
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00

An argument can be seen as a pair consisting of a set of premises and a claim supported by them. Arguments used by humans are often enthymemes, i.e., some premises are implicit. To better understand, evaluate, and compare enthymemes, it is essential to decode them, i.e., to find the missing premisses. Many enthymeme decodings are possible. We need to distinguish between reasonable decodings and unreasonable ones. However, there is currently no research in the literature on "How to evaluate decodings?". To pave the way and achieve this goal, we introduce seven criteria related to decoding, based on different research areas. Then, we introduce the notion of criterion measure, the objective of which is to evaluate a decoding with regard to a certain criterion. Since such measures need to be validated, we introduce several desirable properties for them, called axioms. Another main contribution of the paper is the construction of certain criterion measures that are validated by our axioms. Such measures can be used to identify the best enthymemes decodings.
Vision Language Models are In-Context Value Learners
Authors: Yecheng Jason Ma, Joey Hejna, Ayzaan Wahid, Chuyuan Fu, Dhruv Shah, Jacky Liang, Zhuo Xu, Sean Kirmani, Peng Xu, Danny Driess, Ted Xiao, Jonathan Tompson, Osbert Bastani, Dinesh Jayaraman, Wenhao Yu, Tingnan Zhang, Dorsa Sadigh, Fei Xia
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, World Knowledge

Predicting temporal progress from visual trajectories is important for intelligent robots that can learn, adapt, and improve. However, learning such progress estimator, or temporal value function, across different tasks and domains requires both a large amount of diverse data and methods which can scale and generalize. To address these challenges, we present Generative Value Learning (\GVL), a universal value function estimator that leverages the world knowledge embedded in vision-language models (VLMs) to predict task progress. Naively asking a VLM to predict values for a video sequence performs poorly due to the strong temporal correlation between successive frames. Instead, GVL poses value estimation as a temporal ordering problem over shuffled video frames; this seemingly more challenging task encourages VLMs to more fully exploit their underlying semantic and temporal grounding capabilities to differentiate frames based on their perceived task progress, consequently producing significantly better value predictions. Without any robot or task specific training, GVL can in-context zero-shot and few-shot predict effective values for more than 300 distinct real-world tasks across diverse robot platforms, including challenging bimanual manipulation tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that GVL permits flexible multi-modal in-context learning via examples from heterogeneous tasks and embodiments, such as human videos. The generality of GVL enables various downstream applications pertinent to visuomotor policy learning, including dataset filtering, success detection, and advantage-weighted regression -- all without any model training or finetuning.
Dynamic Detection of Relevant Objectives and Adaptation to Preference Drifts in Interactive Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization
Authors: Seyed Mahdi Shavarani, Mahmoud Golabi, Richard Allmendinger, Lhassane Idoumghar
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Evolutionary Multi-Objective Optimization Algorithms (EMOAs) are widely employed to tackle problems with multiple conflicting objectives. Recent research indicates that not all objectives are equally important to the decision-maker (DM). In the context of interactive EMOAs, preference information elicited from the DM during the optimization process can be leveraged to identify and discard irrelevant objectives, a crucial step when objective evaluations are computationally expensive. However, much of the existing literature fails to account for the dynamic nature of DM preferences, which can evolve throughout the decision-making process and affect the relevance of objectives. This study addresses this limitation by simulating dynamic shifts in DM preferences within a ranking-based interactive algorithm. Additionally, we propose methods to discard outdated or conflicting preferences when such shifts occur. Building on prior research, we also introduce a mechanism to safeguard relevant objectives that may become trapped in local or global optima due to the diminished correlation with the DM-provided rankings. Our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed methods effectively manage evolving preferences and significantly enhance the quality and desirability of the solutions produced by the algorithm.
Meta-Reasoning Improves Tool Use in Large Language Models
Authors: Lisa Alazraki, Marek Rei
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

External tools help large language models (LLMs) succeed at tasks where they would otherwise typically fail. In existing frameworks, LLMs learn tool use either by in-context demonstrations or via full model fine-tuning on annotated data. As these approaches do not easily scale, a recent trend is to abandon them in favor of lightweight, parameter-efficient tuning paradigms. These methods allow quickly alternating between the frozen LLM and its specialised fine-tuned version, by switching on or off a handful of additional custom parameters. Hence, we postulate that the generalization ability of the frozen model can be leveraged to improve tool selection. We present Tool selECTion via meta-reasONing (TECTON), a two-phase system that first reasons over a task using a custom fine-tuned LM head and outputs candidate tools. Then, with the custom head disabled, it meta-reasons (i.e., it reasons over the previous reasoning process) to make a final choice. We show that TECTON results in substantial gains - both in-distribution and out-of-distribution - on a range of math reasoning datasets.
GenJoin: Conditional Generative Plan-to-Plan Query Optimizer that Learns from Subplan Hints
Authors: Pavel Sulimov, Claude Lehmann, Kurt Stockinger
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00

Query optimization has become a research area where classical algorithms are being challenged by machine learning algorithms. At the same time, recent trends in learned query optimizers have shown that it is prudent to take advantage of decades of database research and augment classical query optimizers by shrinking the plan search space through different types of hints (e.g. by specifying the join type, scan type or the order of joins) rather than completely replacing the classical query optimizer with machine learning models. It is especially relevant for cases when classical optimizers cannot fully enumerate all logical and physical plans and, as an alternative, need to rely on less robust approaches like genetic algorithms. However, even symbiotically learned query optimizers are hampered by the need for vast amounts of training data, slow plan generation during inference and unstable results across various workload conditions. In this paper, we present GenJoin - a novel learned query optimizer that considers the query optimization problem as a generative task and is capable of learning from a random set of subplan hints to produce query plans that outperform the classical optimizer. GenJoin is the first learned query optimizer that significantly and consistently outperforms PostgreSQL as well as state-of-the-art methods on two well-known real-world benchmarks across a variety of workloads using rigorous machine learning evaluations.
Continuous Sign Language Recognition System using Deep Learning with MediaPipe Holistic
Authors: Sharvani Srivastava, Sudhakar Singh, Pooja, Shiv Prakash
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Sign Language Recognition

Sign languages are the language of hearing-impaired people who use visuals like the hand, facial, and body movements for communication. There are different signs and gestures representing alphabets, words, and phrases. Nowadays approximately 300 sign languages are being practiced worldwide such as American Sign Language (ASL), Chinese Sign Language (CSL), Indian Sign Language (ISL), and many more. Sign languages are dependent on the vocal language of a place. Unlike vocal or spoken languages, there are no helping words in sign language like is, am, are, was, were, will, be, etc. As only a limited population is well-versed in sign language, this lack of familiarity of sign language hinders hearing-impaired people from communicating freely and easily with everyone. This issue can be addressed by a sign language recognition (SLR) system which has the capability to translate the sign language into vocal language. In this paper, a continuous SLR system is proposed using a deep learning model employing Long Short-Term Memory (LSTM), trained and tested on an ISL primary dataset. This dataset is created using MediaPipe Holistic pipeline for tracking face, hand, and body movements and collecting landmarks. The system recognizes the signs and gestures in real-time with 88.23% accuracy.
FedDP: Privacy-preserving method based on federated learning for histopathology image segmentation
Authors: Liangrui Pan, Mao Huang, Lian Wang, Pinle Qin, Shaoliang Peng
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Image Segmentation, Privacy Preserving, Semantic Segmentation, whole slide images

Hematoxylin and Eosin (H&E) staining of whole slide images (WSIs) is considered the gold standard for pathologists and medical practitioners for tumor diagnosis, surgical planning, and post-operative assessment. With the rapid advancement of deep learning technologies, the development of numerous models based on convolutional neural networks and transformer-based models has been applied to the precise segmentation of WSIs. However, due to privacy regulations and the need to protect patient confidentiality, centralized storage and processing of image data are impractical. Training a centralized model directly is challenging to implement in medical settings due to these privacy concerns.This paper addresses the dispersed nature and privacy sensitivity of medical image data by employing a federated learning framework, allowing medical institutions to collaboratively learn while protecting patient privacy. Additionally, to address the issue of original data reconstruction through gradient inversion during the federated learning training process, differential privacy introduces noise into the model updates, preventing attackers from inferring the contributions of individual samples, thereby protecting the privacy of the training data.Experimental results show that the proposed method, FedDP, minimally impacts model accuracy while effectively safeguarding the privacy of cancer pathology image data, with only a slight decrease in Dice, Jaccard, and Acc indices by 0.55%, 0.63%, and 0.42%, respectively. This approach facilitates cross-institutional collaboration and knowledge sharing while protecting sensitive data privacy, providing a viable solution for further research and application in the medical field.
Series-to-Series Diffusion Bridge Model
Authors: Hao Yang, Zhanbo Feng, Feng Zhou, Robert C Qiu, Zenan Ling
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: model, Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Diffusion models have risen to prominence in time series forecasting, showcasing their robust capability to model complex data distributions. However, their effectiveness in deterministic predictions is often constrained by instability arising from their inherent stochasticity. In this paper, we revisit time series diffusion models and present a comprehensive framework that encompasses most existing diffusion-based methods. Building on this theoretical foundation, we propose a novel diffusion-based time series forecasting model, the Series-to-Series Diffusion Bridge Model ($\mathrm{S^2DBM}$), which leverages the Brownian Bridge process to reduce randomness in reverse estimations and improves accuracy by incorporating informative priors and conditions derived from historical time series data. Experimental results demonstrate that $\mathrm{S^2DBM}$ delivers superior performance in point-to-point forecasting and competes effectively with other diffusion-based models in probabilistic forecasting.
Magentic-One: A Generalist Multi-Agent System for Solving Complex Tasks
Authors: Adam Fourney, Gagan Bansal, Hussein Mozannar, Cheng Tan, Eduardo Salinas, Erkang, Zhu, Friederike Niedtner, Grace Proebsting, Griffin Bassman, Jack Gerrits, Jacob Alber, Peter Chang, Ricky Loynd, Robert West, Victor Dibia, Ahmed Awadallah, Ece Kamar, Rafah Hosn, Saleema Amershi
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00

Modern AI agents, driven by advances in large foundation models, promise to enhance our productivity and transform our lives by augmenting our knowledge and capabilities. To achieve this vision, AI agents must effectively plan, perform multi-step reasoning and actions, respond to novel observations, and recover from errors, to successfully complete complex tasks across a wide range of scenarios. In this work, we introduce Magentic-One, a high-performing open-source agentic system for solving such tasks. Magentic-One uses a multi-agent architecture where a lead agent, the Orchestrator, plans, tracks progress, and re-plans to recover from errors. Throughout task execution, the Orchestrator directs other specialized agents to perform tasks as needed, such as operating a web browser, navigating local files, or writing and executing Python code. We show that Magentic-One achieves statistically competitive performance to the state-of-the-art on three diverse and challenging agentic benchmarks: GAIA, AssistantBench, and WebArena. Magentic-One achieves these results without modification to core agent capabilities or to how they collaborate, demonstrating progress towards generalist agentic systems. Moreover, Magentic-One's modular design allows agents to be added or removed from the team without additional prompt tuning or training, easing development and making it extensible to future scenarios. We provide an open-source implementation of Magentic-One, and we include AutoGenBench, a standalone tool for agentic evaluation. AutoGenBench provides built-in controls for repetition and isolation to run agentic benchmarks in a rigorous and contained manner -- which is important when agents' actions have side-effects. Magentic-One, AutoGenBench and detailed empirical performance evaluations of Magentic-One, including ablations and error analysis are available at https://aka.ms/magentic-one
Enabling Adaptive Agent Training in Open-Ended Simulators by Targeting Diversity
Authors: Robby Costales, Stefanos Nikolaidis
Date: 2024-11-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Meta Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL), Zero-shot Generalization

The wider application of end-to-end learning methods to embodied decision-making domains remains bottlenecked by their reliance on a superabundance of training data representative of the target domain. Meta-reinforcement learning (meta-RL) approaches abandon the aim of zero-shot generalization--the goal of standard reinforcement learning (RL)--in favor of few-shot adaptation, and thus hold promise for bridging larger generalization gaps. While learning this meta-level adaptive behavior still requires substantial data, efficient environment simulators approaching real-world complexity are growing in prevalence. Even so, hand-designing sufficiently diverse and numerous simulated training tasks for these complex domains is prohibitively labor-intensive. Domain randomization (DR) and procedural generation (PG), offered as solutions to this problem, require simulators to possess carefully-defined parameters which directly translate to meaningful task diversity--a similarly prohibitive assumption. In this work, we present DIVA, an evolutionary approach for generating diverse training tasks in such complex, open-ended simulators. Like unsupervised environment design (UED) methods, DIVA can be applied to arbitrary parameterizations, but can additionally incorporate realistically-available domain knowledge--thus inheriting the flexibility and generality of UED, and the supervised structure embedded in well-designed simulators exploited by DR and PG. Our empirical results showcase DIVA's unique ability to overcome complex parameterizations and successfully train adaptive agent behavior, far outperforming competitive baselines from prior literature. These findings highlight the potential of such semi-supervised environment design (SSED) approaches, of which DIVA is the first humble constituent, to enable training in realistic simulated domains, and produce more robust and capable adaptive agents.