pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Exploring CausalWorld: Enhancing robotic manipulation via knowledge transfer and curriculum learning
Authors: Xinrui Wang, Yan Jin
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Transfer Learning

This study explores a learning-based tri-finger robotic arm manipulating task, which requires complex movements and coordination among the fingers. By employing reinforcement learning, we train an agent to acquire the necessary skills for proficient manipulation. To enhance the efficiency and effectiveness of the learning process, two knowledge transfer strategies, fine-tuning and curriculum learning, were utilized within the soft actor-critic architecture. Fine-tuning allows the agent to leverage pre-trained knowledge and adapt it to new tasks. Several variations like model transfer, policy transfer, and across-task transfer were implemented and evaluated. To eliminate the need for pretraining, curriculum learning decomposes the advanced task into simpler, progressive stages, mirroring how humans learn. The number of learning stages, the context of the sub-tasks, and the transition timing were found to be the critical design parameters. The key factors of two learning strategies and corresponding effects were explored in context-aware and context-unaware scenarios, enabling us to identify the scenarios where the methods demonstrate optimal performance, derive conclusive insights, and contribute to a broader range of learning-based engineering applications.
DASA: Delay-Adaptive Multi-Agent Stochastic Approximation
Authors: Nicolò Dal Fabbro, Arman Adibi, H. Vincent Poor, Sanjeev R. Kulkarni, Aritra Mitra, George J. Pappas
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Avg, Q-Learning, Stochastic Optimization

We consider a setting in which $N$ agents aim to speedup a common Stochastic Approximation (SA) problem by acting in parallel and communicating with a central server. We assume that the up-link transmissions to the server are subject to asynchronous and potentially unbounded time-varying delays. To mitigate the effect of delays and stragglers while reaping the benefits of distributed computation, we propose \texttt{DASA}, a Delay-Adaptive algorithm for multi-agent Stochastic Approximation. We provide a finite-time analysis of \texttt{DASA} assuming that the agents' stochastic observation processes are independent Markov chains. Significantly advancing existing results, \texttt{DASA} is the first algorithm whose convergence rate depends only on the mixing time $\tau_{mix}$ and on the average delay $\tau_{avg}$ while jointly achieving an $N$-fold convergence speedup under Markovian sampling. Our work is relevant for various SA applications, including multi-agent and distributed temporal difference (TD) learning, Q-learning and stochastic optimization with correlated data.
TwoStep: Multi-agent Task Planning using Classical Planners and Large Language Models
Authors: David Bai, Ishika Singh, David Traum, Jesse Thomason
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Task Planning

Classical planning formulations like the Planning Domain Definition Language (PDDL) admit action sequences guaranteed to achieve a goal state given an initial state if any are possible. However, reasoning problems defined in PDDL do not capture temporal aspects of action taking, such as concurrent actions between two agents when there are no conflicting conditions, without significant modification and definition to existing PDDL domains. A human expert aware of such constraints can decompose a goal into subgoals, each reachable through single agent planning, to take advantage of simultaneous actions. In contrast to classical planning, large language models (LLMs) directly used for inferring plan steps rarely guarantee execution success, but are capable of leveraging commonsense reasoning to assemble action sequences. We combine the strengths of both classical planning and LLMs by approximating human intuitions for multi-agent planning goal decomposition. We demonstrate that LLM-based goal decomposition leads to faster planning times than solving multi-agent PDDL problems directly while simultaneously achieving fewer plan execution steps than a single agent plan alone, as well as most multiagent plans, while guaranteeing execution success. Additionally, we find that LLM-based approximations of subgoals result in similar multi-agent execution lengths to those specified by human experts. Website and resources at https://glamor-usc.github.io/twostep
DreamPolisher: Towards High-Quality Text-to-3D Generation via Geometric Diffusion
Authors: Yuanze Lin, Ronald Clark, Philip Torr
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Generation, Text to 3D

We present DreamPolisher, a novel Gaussian Splatting based method with geometric guidance, tailored to learn cross-view consistency and intricate detail from textual descriptions. While recent progress on text-to-3D generation methods have been promising, prevailing methods often fail to ensure view-consistency and textural richness. This problem becomes particularly noticeable for methods that work with text input alone. To address this, we propose a two-stage Gaussian Splatting based approach that enforces geometric consistency among views. Initially, a coarse 3D generation undergoes refinement via geometric optimization. Subsequently, we use a ControlNet driven refiner coupled with the geometric consistency term to improve both texture fidelity and overall consistency of the generated 3D asset. Empirical evaluations across diverse textual prompts spanning various object categories demonstrate the efficacy of DreamPolisher in generating consistent and realistic 3D objects, aligning closely with the semantics of the textual instructions.
Speeding Up Path Planning via Reinforcement Learning in MCTS for Automated Parking
Authors: Xinlong Zheng, Xiaozhou Zhang, Donghao Xu
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

In this paper, we address a method that integrates reinforcement learning into the Monte Carlo tree search to boost online path planning under fully observable environments for automated parking tasks. Sampling-based planning methods under high-dimensional space can be computationally expensive and time-consuming. State evaluation methods are useful by leveraging the prior knowledge into the search steps, making the process faster in a real-time system. Given the fact that automated parking tasks are often executed under complex environments, a solid but lightweight heuristic guidance is challenging to compose in a traditional analytical way. To overcome this limitation, we propose a reinforcement learning pipeline with a Monte Carlo tree search under the path planning framework. By iteratively learning the value of a state and the best action among samples from its previous cycle's outcomes, we are able to model a value estimator and a policy generator for given states. By doing that, we build up a balancing mechanism between exploration and exploitation, speeding up the path planning process while maintaining its quality without using human expert driver data.
Uncertainty Quantification for Gradient-based Explanations in Neural Networks
Authors: Mihir Mulye, Matias Valdenegro-Toro
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Uncertainty Quantification

Explanation methods help understand the reasons for a model's prediction. These methods are increasingly involved in model debugging, performance optimization, and gaining insights into the workings of a model. With such critical applications of these methods, it is imperative to measure the uncertainty associated with the explanations generated by these methods. In this paper, we propose a pipeline to ascertain the explanation uncertainty of neural networks by combining uncertainty estimation methods and explanation methods. We use this pipeline to produce explanation distributions for the CIFAR-10, FER+, and California Housing datasets. By computing the coefficient of variation of these distributions, we evaluate the confidence in the explanation and determine that the explanations generated using Guided Backpropagation have low uncertainty associated with them. Additionally, we compute modified pixel insertion/deletion metrics to evaluate the quality of the generated explanations.
Co-Occurring of Object Detection and Identification towards unlabeled object discovery
Authors: Binay Kumar Singh, Niels da Vitoria Lobo
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Object, object-detection, Object Detection, Object Discovery

In this paper, we propose a novel deep learning based approach for identifying co-occurring objects in conjunction with base objects in multilabel object categories. Nowadays, with the advancement in computer vision based techniques we need to know about co-occurring objects with respect to base object for various purposes. The pipeline of the proposed work is composed of two stages: in the first stage of the proposed model we detect all the bounding boxes present in the image and their corresponding labels, then in the second stage we perform co-occurrence matrix analysis. In co-occurrence matrix analysis, we set base classes based on the maximum occurrences of the labels and build association rules and generate frequent patterns. These frequent patterns will show base classes and their corresponding co-occurring classes. We performed our experiments on two publicly available datasets: Pascal VOC and MS-COCO. The experimental results on public benchmark dataset is reported in Sec 4. Further we extend this work by considering all frequently objects as unlabeled and what if they are occluded as well.
SeSaMe: A Framework to Simulate Self-Reported Ground Truth for Mental Health Sensing Studies
Authors: Akshat Choube, Vedant Das Swain, Varun Mishra
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Missing Labels

Advances in mobile and wearable technologies have enabled the potential to passively monitor a person's mental, behavioral, and affective health. These approaches typically rely on longitudinal collection of self-reported outcomes, e.g., depression, stress, and anxiety, to train machine learning (ML) models. However, the need to continuously self-report adds a significant burden on the participants, often resulting in attrition, missing labels, or insincere responses. In this work, we introduce the Scale Scores Simulation using Mental Models (SeSaMe) framework to alleviate participants' burden in digital mental health studies. By leveraging pre-trained large language models (LLMs), SeSaMe enables the simulation of participants' responses on psychological scales. In SeSaMe, researchers can prompt LLMs with information on participants' internal behavioral dispositions, enabling LLMs to construct mental models of participants to simulate their responses on psychological scales. We demonstrate an application of SeSaMe, where we use GPT-4 to simulate responses on one scale using responses from another as behavioral information. We also evaluate the alignment between human and SeSaMe-simulated responses to psychological scales. Then, we present experiments to inspect the utility of SeSaMe-simulated responses as ground truth in training ML models by replicating established depression and anxiety screening tasks from a previous study. Our results indicate SeSaMe to be a promising approach, but its alignment may vary across scales and specific prediction objectives. We also observed that model performance with simulated data was on par with using the real data for training in most evaluation scenarios. We conclude by discussing the potential implications of SeSaMe in addressing some challenges researchers face with ground-truth collection in passive sensing studies.
DiffusionAct: Controllable Diffusion Autoencoder for One-shot Face Reenactment
Authors: Stella Bounareli, Christos Tzelepis, Vasileios Argyriou, Ioannis Patras, Georgios Tzimiropoulos
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Face Reenactment, Image Generation

Video-driven neural face reenactment aims to synthesize realistic facial images that successfully preserve the identity and appearance of a source face, while transferring the target head pose and facial expressions. Existing GAN-based methods suffer from either distortions and visual artifacts or poor reconstruction quality, i.e., the background and several important appearance details, such as hair style/color, glasses and accessories, are not faithfully reconstructed. Recent advances in Diffusion Probabilistic Models (DPMs) enable the generation of high-quality realistic images. To this end, in this paper we present DiffusionAct, a novel method that leverages the photo-realistic image generation of diffusion models to perform neural face reenactment. Specifically, we propose to control the semantic space of a Diffusion Autoencoder (DiffAE), in order to edit the facial pose of the input images, defined as the head pose orientation and the facial expressions. Our method allows one-shot, self, and cross-subject reenactment, without requiring subject-specific fine-tuning. We compare against state-of-the-art GAN-, StyleGAN2-, and diffusion-based methods, showing better or on-par reenactment performance.
Exploring the Impact of the Output Format on the Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Translation
Authors: Marcos Macedo, Yuan Tian, Filipe R. Cogo, Bram Adams
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Translation, Prompt Engineering, Translation

Code translation between programming languages is a long-existing and critical task in software engineering, facilitating the modernization of legacy systems, ensuring cross-platform compatibility, and enhancing software performance. With the recent advances in large language models (LLMs) and their applications to code translation, there is an increasing need for comprehensive evaluation of these models. In this study, we empirically analyze the generated outputs of eleven popular instruct-tuned LLMs with parameters ranging from 1B up to 46.7B on 3,820 translation pairs across five languages, including C, C++, Go, Java, and Python. Our analysis found that between 26.4% and 73.7% of code translations produced by our evaluated LLMs necessitate post-processing, as these translations often include a mix of code, quotes, and text rather than being purely source code. Overlooking the output format of these models can inadvertently lead to underestimation of their actual performance. This is particularly evident when evaluating them with execution-based metrics such as Computational Accuracy (CA). Our results demonstrate that a strategic combination of prompt engineering and regular expression can effectively extract the source code from the model generation output. In particular, our method can help eleven selected models achieve an average Code Extraction Success Rate (CSR) of 92.73%. Our findings shed light on and motivate future research to conduct more reliable benchmarks of LLMs for code translation.
Sanity Checks for Explanation Uncertainty
Authors: Matias Valdenegro-Toro, Mihir Mulye
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00

Explanations for machine learning models can be hard to interpret or be wrong. Combining an explanation method with an uncertainty estimation method produces explanation uncertainty. Evaluating explanation uncertainty is difficult. In this paper we propose sanity checks for uncertainty explanation methods, where a weight and data randomization tests are defined for explanations with uncertainty, allowing for quick tests to combinations of uncertainty and explanation methods. We experimentally show the validity and effectiveness of these tests on the CIFAR10 and California Housing datasets, noting that Ensembles seem to consistently pass both tests with Guided Backpropagation, Integrated Gradients, and LIME explanations.
CADGL: Context-Aware Deep Graph Learning for Predicting Drug-Drug Interactions
Authors: Azmine Toushik Wasi, Taki Hasan Rafi, Raima Islam, Serbetar Karlo, Dong-Kyu Chae
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Drug–drug Interaction Extraction, Graph Learning

Examining Drug-Drug Interactions (DDIs) is a pivotal element in the process of drug development. DDIs occur when one drug's properties are affected by the inclusion of other drugs. Detecting favorable DDIs has the potential to pave the way for creating and advancing innovative medications applicable in practical settings. However, existing DDI prediction models continue to face challenges related to generalization in extreme cases, robust feature extraction, and real-life application possibilities. We aim to address these challenges by leveraging the effectiveness of context-aware deep graph learning by introducing a novel framework named CADGL. Based on a customized variational graph autoencoder (VGAE), we capture critical structural and physio-chemical information using two context preprocessors for feature extraction from two different perspectives: local neighborhood and molecular context, in a heterogeneous graphical structure. Our customized VGAE consists of a graph encoder, a latent information encoder, and an MLP decoder. CADGL surpasses other state-of-the-art DDI prediction models, excelling in predicting clinically valuable novel DDIs, supported by rigorous case studies.
Generation of Asset Administration Shell with Large Language Model Agents: Toward Semantic Interoperability in Digital Twins in the Context of Industry 4.0
Authors: Yuchen Xia, Zhewen Xiao, Nasser Jazdi, Michael Weyrich
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This research introduces a novel approach for achieving semantic interoperability in digital twins and assisting the creation of Asset Administration Shell (AAS) as digital twin model within the context of Industry 4.0. The foundational idea of our research is that the communication based on semantics and the generation of meaningful textual data are directly linked, and we posit that these processes are equivalent if the exchanged information can be serialized in text form. Based on this, we construct a "semantic node" data structure in our research to capture the semantic essence of textual data. Then, a system powered by large language models is designed and implemented to process the "semantic node" and generate standardized digital twin models from raw textual data collected from datasheets describing technical assets. Our evaluation demonstrates an effective generation rate of 62-79%, indicating a substantial proportion of the information from the source text can be translated error-free to the target digital twin instance model with the generative capability of large language models. This result has a direct application in the context of Industry 4.0, and the designed system is implemented as a data model generation tool for reducing the manual effort in creating AAS model. In our evaluation, a comparative analysis of different LLMs and an in-depth ablation study of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mechanisms provide insights into the effectiveness of LLM systems for interpreting technical concepts and translating data. Our findings emphasize LLMs' capability to automate AAS instance creation and contribute to the broader field of semantic interoperability for digital twins in industrial applications. The prototype implementation and evaluation results are presented on our GitHub Repository: https://github.com/YuchenXia/AASbyLLM.
QuanTemp: A real-world open-domain benchmark for fact-checking numerical claims
Authors: Venktesh V, Abhijit Anand, Avishek Anand, Vinay Setty
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Claim Verification, Fact Checking, Misinformation

Automated fact checking has gained immense interest to tackle the growing misinformation in the digital era. Existing systems primarily focus on synthetic claims on Wikipedia, and noteworthy progress has also been made on real-world claims. In this work, we release QuanTemp, a diverse, multi-domain dataset focused exclusively on numerical claims, encompassing temporal, statistical and diverse aspects with fine-grained metadata and an evidence collection without leakage. This addresses the challenge of verifying real-world numerical claims, which are complex and often lack precise information, not addressed by existing works that mainly focus on synthetic claims. We evaluate and quantify the limitations of existing solutions for the task of verifying numerical claims. We also evaluate claim decomposition based methods, numerical understanding based models and our best baselines achieves a macro-F1 of 58.32. This demonstrates that QuanTemp serves as a challenging evaluation set for numerical claim verification.
Multi-Objective Quality-Diversity for Crystal Structure Prediction
Authors: Hannah Janmohamed, Marta Wolinska, Shikha Surana, Thomas Pierrot, Aron Walsh, Antoine Cully
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Prediction

Crystal structures are indispensable across various domains, from batteries to solar cells, and extensive research has been dedicated to predicting their properties based on their atomic configurations. However, prevailing Crystal Structure Prediction methods focus on identifying the most stable solutions that lie at the global minimum of the energy function. This approach overlooks other potentially interesting materials that lie in neighbouring local minima and have different material properties such as conductivity or resistance to deformation. By contrast, Quality-Diversity algorithms provide a promising avenue for Crystal Structure Prediction as they aim to find a collection of high-performing solutions that have diverse characteristics. However, it may also be valuable to optimise for the stability of crystal structures alongside other objectives such as magnetism or thermoelectric efficiency. Therefore, in this work, we harness the power of Multi-Objective Quality-Diversity algorithms in order to find crystal structures which have diverse features and achieve different trade-offs of objectives. We analyse our approach on 5 crystal systems and demonstrate that it is not only able to re-discover known real-life structures, but also find promising new ones. Moreover, we propose a method for illuminating the objective space to gain an understanding of what trade-offs can be achieved.
Less Is More - On the Importance of Sparsification for Transformers and Graph Neural Networks for TSP
Authors: Attila Lischka, Jiaming Wu, Rafael Basso, Morteza Haghir Chehreghani, Balázs Kulcsár
Date: 2024-03-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network, Traveling Salesman Problem

Most of the recent studies tackling routing problems like the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) with machine learning use a transformer or Graph Neural Network (GNN) based encoder architecture. However, many of them apply these encoders naively by allowing them to aggregate information over the whole TSP instances. We, on the other hand, propose a data preprocessing method that allows the encoders to focus on the most relevant parts of the TSP instances only. In particular, we propose graph sparsification for TSP graph representations passed to GNNs and attention masking for TSP instances passed to transformers where the masks correspond to the adjacency matrices of the sparse TSP graph representations. Furthermore, we propose ensembles of different sparsification levels allowing models to focus on the most promising parts while also allowing information flow between all nodes of a TSP instance. In the experimental studies, we show that for GNNs appropriate sparsification and ensembles of different sparsification levels lead to substantial performance increases of the overall architecture. We also design a new, state-of-the-art transformer encoder with ensembles of attention masking. These transformers increase model performance from a gap of $0.16\%$ to $0.10\%$ for TSP instances of size 100 and from $0.02\%$ to $0.00\%$ for TSP instances of size 50.