pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
SOEN-101: Code Generation by Emulating Software Process Models Using Large Language Model Agents
Authors: Feng Lin, Dong Jae Kim, Tse-Husn, Chen
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, HumanEval, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, mbpp

Software process models are essential to facilitate collaboration and communication among software teams to solve complex development tasks. Inspired by these software engineering practices, we present FlowGen - a code generation framework that emulates software process models based on multiple Large Language Model (LLM) agents. We emulate three process models, FlowGenWaterfall, FlowGenTDD, and FlowGenScrum, by assigning LLM agents to embody roles (i.e., requirement engineer, architect, developer, tester, and scrum master) that correspond to everyday development activities and organize their communication patterns. The agents work collaboratively using chain-of-thought and prompt composition with continuous self-refinement to improve the code quality. We use GPT3.5 as our underlying LLM and several baselines (RawGPT, CodeT, Reflexion) to evaluate code generation on four benchmarks: HumanEval, HumanEval-ET, MBPP, and MBPP-ET. Our findings show that FlowGenScrum excels compared to other process models, achieving a Pass@1 of 75.2, 65.5, 82.5, and 56.7 in HumanEval, HumanEval-ET, MBPP, and MBPP-ET, respectively (an average of 15% improvement over RawGPT). Compared with other state-of-the-art techniques, FlowGenScrum achieves a higher Pass@1 in MBPP compared to CodeT, with both outperforming Reflexion. Notably, integrating CodeT into FlowGenScrum resulted in statistically significant improvements, achieving the highest Pass@1 scores. Our analysis also reveals that the development activities impacted code smell and exception handling differently, with design and code review adding more exception handling and reducing code smells. Finally, FlowGen models maintain stable Pass@1 scores across GPT3.5 versions and temperature values, highlighting the effectiveness of software process models in enhancing the quality and stability of LLM-generated code.
ARO: Large Language Model Supervised Robotics Text2Skill Autonomous Learning
Authors: YiWen Chen, Yuyao Ye, Ziyi Chen, Chuheng Zhang, Marcelo H. Ang
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Robotics learning highly relies on human expertise and efforts, such as demonstrations, design of reward functions in reinforcement learning, performance evaluation using human feedback, etc. However, reliance on human assistance can lead to expensive learning costs and make skill learning difficult to scale. In this work, we introduce the Large Language Model Supervised Robotics Text2Skill Autonomous Learning (ARO) framework, which aims to replace human participation in the robot skill learning process with large-scale language models that incorporate reward function design and performance evaluation. We provide evidence that our approach enables fully autonomous robot skill learning, capable of completing partial tasks without human intervention. Furthermore, we also analyze the limitations of this approach in task understanding and optimization stability.
Scaling Learning based Policy Optimization for Temporal Logic Tasks by Controller Network Dropout
Authors: Navid Hashemi, Bardh Hoxha, Danil Prokhorov, Georgios Fainekos, Jyotirmoy Deshmukh
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00

This paper introduces a model-based approach for training feedback controllers for an autonomous agent operating in a highly nonlinear (albeit deterministic) environment. We desire the trained policy to ensure that the agent satisfies specific task objectives and safety constraints, both expressed in Discrete-Time Signal Temporal Logic (DT-STL). One advantage for reformulation of a task via formal frameworks, like DT-STL, is that it permits quantitative satisfaction semantics. In other words, given a trajectory and a DT-STL formula, we can compute the {\em robustness}, which can be interpreted as an approximate signed distance between the trajectory and the set of trajectories satisfying the formula. We utilize feedback control, and we assume a feed forward neural network for learning the feedback controller. We show how this learning problem is similar to training recurrent neural networks (RNNs), where the number of recurrent units is proportional to the temporal horizon of the agent's task objectives. This poses a challenge: RNNs are susceptible to vanishing and exploding gradients, and na\"{i}ve gradient descent-based strategies to solve long-horizon task objectives thus suffer from the same problems. To tackle this challenge, we introduce a novel gradient approximation algorithm based on the idea of dropout or gradient sampling. One of the main contributions is the notion of {\em controller network dropout}, where we approximate the NN controller in several time-steps in the task horizon by the control input obtained using the controller in a previous training step. We show that our control synthesis methodology, can be quite helpful for stochastic gradient descent to converge with less numerical issues, enabling scalable backpropagation over long time horizons and trajectories over high dimensional state spaces.
Carbon Intensity-Aware Adaptive Inference of DNNs
Authors: Jiwan Jung
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Selection

DNN inference, known for its significant energy consumption and the resulting high carbon footprint, can be made more sustainable by adapting model size and accuracy to the varying carbon intensity throughout the day. Our heuristic algorithm uses larger, high-accuracy models during low-intensity periods and smaller, lower-accuracy ones during high-intensity periods. We also introduce a metric, carbon-emission efficiency, which quantitatively measures the efficacy of adaptive model selection in terms of carbon footprint. The evaluation showed that the proposed approach could improve the carbon emission efficiency in improving the accuracy of vision recognition services by up to 80%.
The Impact of Evolutionary Computation on Robotic Design: A Case Study with an Underactuated Hand Exoskeleton
Authors: Baris Akbas, Huseyin Taner Yuksel, Aleyna Soylemez, Mazhar Eid Zyada, Mine Sarac, Fabio Stroppa
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00

Robotic exoskeletons can enhance human strength and aid people with physical disabilities. However, designing them to ensure safety and optimal performance presents significant challenges. Developing exoskeletons should incorporate specific optimization algorithms to find the best design. This study investigates the potential of Evolutionary Computation (EC) methods in robotic design optimization, with an underactuated hand exoskeleton (U-HEx) used as a case study. We propose improving the performance and usability of the U-HEx design, which was initially optimized using a naive brute-force approach, by integrating EC techniques such as Genetic Algorithm and Big Bang-Big Crunch Algorithm. Comparative analysis revealed that EC methods consistently yield more precise and optimal solutions than brute force in a significantly shorter time. This allowed us to improve the optimization by increasing the number of variables in the design, which was impossible with naive methods. The results show significant improvements in terms of the torque magnitude the device transfers to the user, enhancing its efficiency. These findings underline the importance of performing proper optimization while designing exoskeletons, as well as providing a significant improvement to this specific robotic design.
Efficient Data Access Paths for Mixed Vector-Relational Search
Authors: Viktor Sanca, Anastasia Ailamaki
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

The rapid growth of machine learning capabilities and the adoption of data processing methods using vector embeddings sparked a great interest in creating systems for vector data management. While the predominant approach of vector data management is to use specialized index structures for fast search over the entirety of the vector embeddings, once combined with other (meta)data, the search queries can also become selective on relational attributes - typical for analytical queries. As using vector indexes differs from traditional relational data access, we revisit and analyze alternative access paths for efficient mixed vector-relational search. We first evaluate the accurate but exhaustive scan-based search and propose hardware optimizations and alternative tensor-based formulation and batching to offset the cost. We outline the complex access-path design space, primarily driven by relational selectivity, and the decisions to consider when selecting an exhaustive scan-based search against an approximate index-based approach. Since the vector index primarily avoids expensive computation across the entire dataset, contrary to the common relational knowledge, it is better to scan at lower selectivity and probe at higher, with a cross-point between the two approaches dictated by data dimensionality and the number of concurrent search queries.
Understanding Emergent Abilities of Language Models from the Loss Perspective
Authors: Zhengxiao Du, Aohan Zeng, Yuxiao Dong, Jie Tang
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00

Recent studies have put into question the belief that emergent abilities in language models are exclusive to large models. This skepticism arises from two observations: 1) smaller models can also exhibit high performance on emergent abilities and 2) there is doubt on the discontinuous metrics used to measure these abilities. In this paper, we propose to study emergent abilities in the lens of pre-training loss, instead of model size or training compute. We demonstrate that the Transformer models with the same pre-training loss, but different model and data sizes, generate the same performance on various downstream tasks, with a fixed data corpus, tokenization, and model architecture. We also discover that a model exhibits emergent abilities on certain tasks -- regardless of the continuity of metrics -- when its pre-training loss falls below a specific threshold. Before reaching this threshold, its performance remains at the level of random guessing. This inspires us to redefine emergent abilities as those that manifest in models with lower pre-training losses, highlighting that these abilities cannot be predicted by merely extrapolating the performance trends of models with higher pre-training losses.
The Frontier of Data Erasure: Machine Unlearning for Large Language Models
Authors: Youyang Qu, Ming Ding, Nan Sun, Kanchana Thilakarathna, Tianqing Zhu, Dusit Niyato
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Machine Unlearning, Text Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are foundational to AI advancements, facilitating applications like predictive text generation. Nonetheless, they pose risks by potentially memorizing and disseminating sensitive, biased, or copyrighted information from their vast datasets. Machine unlearning emerges as a cutting-edge solution to mitigate these concerns, offering techniques for LLMs to selectively discard certain data. This paper reviews the latest in machine unlearning for LLMs, introducing methods for the targeted forgetting of information to address privacy, ethical, and legal challenges without necessitating full model retraining. It divides existing research into unlearning from unstructured/textual data and structured/classification data, showcasing the effectiveness of these approaches in removing specific data while maintaining model efficacy. Highlighting the practicality of machine unlearning, this analysis also points out the hurdles in preserving model integrity, avoiding excessive or insufficient data removal, and ensuring consistent outputs, underlining the role of machine unlearning in advancing responsible, ethical AI.
Modeling Unified Semantic Discourse Structure for High-quality Headline Generation
Authors: Minghui Xu, Hao Fei, Fei Li, Shengqiong Wu, Rui Sun, Chong Teng, Donghong Ji
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Abstract Meaning Representation, Headline Generation, Sentence

Headline generation aims to summarize a long document with a short, catchy title that reflects the main idea. This requires accurately capturing the core document semantics, which is challenging due to the lengthy and background information-rich na ture of the texts. In this work, We propose using a unified semantic discourse structure (S3) to represent document semantics, achieved by combining document-level rhetorical structure theory (RST) trees with sentence-level abstract meaning representation (AMR) graphs to construct S3 graphs. The hierarchical composition of sentence, clause, and word intrinsically characterizes the semantic meaning of the overall document. We then develop a headline generation framework, in which the S3 graphs are encoded as contextual features. To consolidate the efficacy of S3 graphs, we further devise a hierarchical structure pruning mechanism to dynamically screen the redundant and nonessential nodes within the graph. Experimental results on two headline generation datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms existing state-of-art methods consistently. Our work can be instructive for a broad range of document modeling tasks, more than headline or summarization generation.
FusionINN: Decomposable Image Fusion for Brain Tumor Monitoring
Authors: Nishant Kumar, Ziyan Tao, Jaikirat Singh, Yang Li, Peiwen Sun, Binghui Zhao, Stefan Gumhold
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Diagnostic, Multi-Exposure Image Fusion

Image fusion typically employs non-invertible neural networks to merge multiple source images into a single fused image. However, for clinical experts, solely relying on fused images may be insufficient for making diagnostic decisions, as the fusion mechanism blends features from source images, thereby making it difficult to interpret the underlying tumor pathology. We introduce FusionINN, a novel decomposable image fusion framework, capable of efficiently generating fused images and also decomposing them back to the source images. FusionINN is designed to be bijective by including a latent image alongside the fused image, while ensuring minimal transfer of information from the source images to the latent representation. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to investigate the decomposability of fused images, which is particularly crucial for life-sensitive applications such as medical image fusion compared to other tasks like multi-focus or multi-exposure image fusion. Our extensive experimentation validates FusionINN over existing discriminative and generative fusion methods, both subjectively and objectively. Moreover, compared to a recent denoising diffusion-based fusion model, our approach offers faster and qualitatively better fusion results.
BEND: Bagging Deep Learning Training Based on Efficient Neural Network Diffusion
Authors: Jia Wei, Xingjun Zhang, Witold Pedrycz
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Diversity, Efficient Neural Network

Bagging has achieved great success in the field of machine learning by integrating multiple base classifiers to build a single strong classifier to reduce model variance. The performance improvement of bagging mainly relies on the number and diversity of base classifiers. However, traditional deep learning model training methods are expensive to train individually and difficult to train multiple models with low similarity in a restricted dataset. Recently, diffusion models, which have been tremendously successful in the fields of imaging and vision, have been found to be effective in generating neural network model weights and biases with diversity. We creatively propose a Bagging deep learning training algorithm based on Efficient Neural network Diffusion (BEND). The originality of BEND comes from the first use of a neural network diffusion model to efficiently build base classifiers for bagging. Our approach is simple but effective, first using multiple trained model weights and biases as inputs to train autoencoder and latent diffusion model to realize a diffusion model from noise to valid neural network parameters. Subsequently, we generate several base classifiers using the trained diffusion model. Finally, we integrate these ba se classifiers for various inference tasks using the Bagging method. Resulting experiments on multiple models and datasets show that our proposed BEND algorithm can consistently outperform the mean and median accuracies of both the original trained model and the diffused model. At the same time, new models diffused using the diffusion model have higher diversity and lower cost than multiple models trained using traditional methods. The BEND approach successfully introduces diffusion models into the new deep learning training domain and provides a new paradigm for future deep learning training and inference.
Towards Human-Like Machine Comprehension: Few-Shot Relational Learning in Visually-Rich Documents
Authors: Hao Wang, Tang Li, Chenhui Chu, Nengjun Zhu, Rui Wang, Pinpin Zhu
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Document AI, Reading Comprehension, Relation, Relational Reasoning

Key-value relations are prevalent in Visually-Rich Documents (VRDs), often depicted in distinct spatial regions accompanied by specific color and font styles. These non-textual cues serve as important indicators that greatly enhance human comprehension and acquisition of such relation triplets. However, current document AI approaches often fail to consider this valuable prior information related to visual and spatial features, resulting in suboptimal performance, particularly when dealing with limited examples. To address this limitation, our research focuses on few-shot relational learning, specifically targeting the extraction of key-value relation triplets in VRDs. Given the absence of a suitable dataset for this task, we introduce two new few-shot benchmarks built upon existing supervised benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we propose a variational approach that incorporates relational 2D-spatial priors and prototypical rectification techniques. This approach aims to generate relation representations that are more aware of the spatial context and unseen relation in a manner similar to human perception. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method by showcasing its ability to outperform existing methods. This study also opens up new possibilities for practical applications.
An Upload-Efficient Scheme for Transferring Knowledge From a Server-Side Pre-trained Generator to Clients in Heterogeneous Federated Learning
Authors: Jianqing Zhang, Yang Liu, Yang Hua, Jian Cao
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2024 1
Tasks: Federated Learning, Transfer Learning

Heterogeneous Federated Learning (HtFL) enables task-specific knowledge sharing among clients with different model architectures while preserving privacy. Despite recent research progress, transferring knowledge in HtFL is still difficult due to data and model heterogeneity. To tackle this, we introduce a public pre-trained generator (e.g., StyleGAN or Stable Diffusion) as the bridge and propose a new upload-efficient knowledge transfer scheme called Federated Knowledge-Transfer-Loop (FedKTL). It can produce task-related prototypical image-vector pairs via the generator's inference on the server. With these pairs, each client can transfer common knowledge from the generator to its local model through an additional supervised local task. We conduct extensive experiments on four datasets under two types of data heterogeneity with 14 heterogeneous models, including CNNs and ViTs. Results show that our FedKTL surpasses seven state-of-the-art methods by up to 7.31%. Moreover, our knowledge transfer scheme is applicable in cloud-edge scenarios with only one edge client. Code: https://github.com/TsingZ0/FedKTL
User-Side Realization
Authors: Ryoma Sato
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00

Users are dissatisfied with services. Since the service is not tailor-made for a user, it is natural for dissatisfaction to arise. The problem is, that even if users are dissatisfied, they often do not have the means to resolve their dissatisfaction. The user cannot alter the source code of the service, nor can they force the service provider to change. The user has no choice but to remain dissatisfied or quit the service. User-side realization offers proactive solutions to this problem by providing general algorithms to deal with common problems on the user's side. These algorithms run on the user's side and solve the problems without having the service provider change the service itself.
Leveraging Large Language Models for Preliminary Security Risk Analysis: A Mission-Critical Case Study
Authors: Matteo Esposito, Francesco Palagiano
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Preliminary security risk analysis (PSRA) provides a quick approach to identify, evaluate and propose remeditation to potential risks in specific scenarios. The extensive expertise required for an effective PSRA and the substantial ammount of textual-related tasks hinder quick assessments in mission-critical contexts, where timely and prompt actions are essential. The speed and accuracy of human experts in PSRA significantly impact response time. A large language model can quickly summarise information in less time than a human. To our knowledge, no prior study has explored the capabilities of fine-tuned models (FTM) in PSRA. Our case study investigates the proficiency of FTM to assist practitioners in PSRA. We manually curated 141 representative samples from over 50 mission-critical analyses archived by the industrial context team in the last five years.We compared the proficiency of the FTM versus seven human experts. Within the industrial context, our approach has proven successful in reducing errors in PSRA, hastening security risk detection, and minimizing false positives and negatives. This translates to cost savings for the company by averting unnecessary expenses associated with implementing unwarranted countermeasures. Therefore, experts can focus on more comprehensive risk analysis, leveraging LLMs for an effective preliminary assessment within a condensed timeframe.
CodeShell Technical Report
Authors: Rui Xie, Zhengran Zeng, Zhuohao Yu, Chang Gao, Shikun Zhang, Wei Ye
Date: 2024-03-23 00:00:00
Tasks: 8k, HumanEval

Code large language models mark a pivotal breakthrough in artificial intelligence. They are specifically crafted to understand and generate programming languages, significantly boosting the efficiency of coding development workflows. In this technical report, we present CodeShell-Base, a seven billion-parameter foundation model with 8K context length, showcasing exceptional proficiency in code comprehension. By incorporating Grouped-Query Attention and Rotary Positional Embedding into GPT-2, CodeShell-Base integrates the structural merits of StarCoder and CodeLlama and forms its unique architectural design. We then carefully built a comprehensive data pre-processing process, including similar data deduplication, perplexity-based data filtering, and model-based data filtering. Through this process, We have curated 100 billion high-quality pre-training data from GitHub. Benefiting from the high-quality data, CodeShell-Base outperforms CodeLlama in Humaneval after training on just 500 billion tokens (5 epochs). We have conducted extensive experiments across multiple language datasets, including Python, Java, and C++, and the results indicate that our model possesses robust foundational capabilities in code comprehension and generation.