pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
HD-Eval: Aligning Large Language Model Evaluators Through Hierarchical Criteria Decomposition
Authors: Yuxuan Liu, Tianchi Yang, Shaohan Huang, Zihan Zhang, Haizhen Huang, Furu Wei, Weiwei Deng, Feng Sun, Qi Zhang
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising alternative to expensive human evaluations. However, the alignment and coverage of LLM-based evaluations are often limited by the scope and potential bias of the evaluation prompts and criteria. To address this challenge, we propose HD-Eval, a novel framework that iteratively aligns LLM-based evaluators with human preference via Hierarchical Criteria Decomposition. HD-Eval inherits the essence from the evaluation mindset of human experts and enhances the alignment of LLM-based evaluators by decomposing a given evaluation task into finer-grained criteria, aggregating them according to estimated human preferences, pruning insignificant criteria with attribution, and further decomposing significant criteria. By integrating these steps within an iterative alignment training process, we obtain a hierarchical decomposition of criteria that comprehensively captures aspects of natural language at multiple levels of granularity. Implemented as a white box, the human preference-guided aggregator is efficient to train and more explainable than relying solely on prompting, and its independence from model parameters makes it applicable to closed-source LLMs. Extensive experiments on three evaluation domains demonstrate the superiority of HD-Eval in further aligning state-of-the-art evaluators and providing deeper insights into the explanation of evaluation results and the task itself.
Leveraging ChatGPT in Pharmacovigilance Event Extraction: An Empirical Study
Authors: Zhaoyue Sun, Gabriele Pergola, Byron C. Wallace, Yulan He
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Event Extraction, Pharmacovigilance

With the advent of large language models (LLMs), there has been growing interest in exploring their potential for medical applications. This research aims to investigate the ability of LLMs, specifically ChatGPT, in the context of pharmacovigilance event extraction, of which the main goal is to identify and extract adverse events or potential therapeutic events from textual medical sources. We conduct extensive experiments to assess the performance of ChatGPT in the pharmacovigilance event extraction task, employing various prompts and demonstration selection strategies. The findings demonstrate that while ChatGPT demonstrates reasonable performance with appropriate demonstration selection strategies, it still falls short compared to fully fine-tuned small models. Additionally, we explore the potential of leveraging ChatGPT for data augmentation. However, our investigation reveals that the inclusion of synthesized data into fine-tuning may lead to a decrease in performance, possibly attributed to noise in the ChatGPT-generated labels. To mitigate this, we explore different filtering strategies and find that, with the proper approach, more stable performance can be achieved, although constant improvement remains elusive.
Exploring Failure Cases in Multimodal Reasoning About Physical Dynamics
Authors: Sadaf Ghaffari, Nikhil Krishnaswamy
Date: 2024-02-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Multimodal Reasoning, Object, World Knowledge

In this paper, we present an exploration of LLMs' abilities to problem solve with physical reasoning in situated environments. We construct a simple simulated environment and demonstrate examples of where, in a zero-shot setting, both text and multimodal LLMs display atomic world knowledge about various objects but fail to compose this knowledge in correct solutions for an object manipulation and placement task. We also use BLIP, a vision-language model trained with more sophisticated cross-modal attention, to identify cases relevant to object physical properties that that model fails to ground. Finally, we present a procedure for discovering the relevant properties of objects in the environment and propose a method to distill this knowledge back into the LLM.
Addressing Order Sensitivity of In-Context Demonstration Examples in Causal Language Models
Authors: Yanzheng Xiang, Hanqi Yan, Lin Gui, Yulan He
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, Contrastive Learning, In-Context Learning, Sensitivity

In-context learning has become a popular paradigm in natural language processing. However, its performance can be significantly influenced by the order of in-context demonstration examples. In this paper, we found that causal language models (CausalLMs) are more sensitive to this order compared to prefix language models (PrefixLMs). We attribute this phenomenon to the auto-regressive attention masks within CausalLMs, which restrict each token from accessing information from subsequent tokens. This results in different receptive fields for samples at different positions, thereby leading to representation disparities across positions. To tackle this challenge, we introduce an unsupervised fine-tuning method, termed the Information-Augmented and Consistency-Enhanced approach. This approach utilizes contrastive learning to align representations of in-context examples across different positions and introduces a consistency loss to ensure similar representations for inputs with different permutations. This enhances the model's predictive consistency across permutations. Experimental results on five benchmarks suggest that our proposed method can reduce the sensitivity of CausalLMs to the order of in-context examples and exhibit robust generalizability, particularly when demonstrations are sourced from a candidate pool different from that used in the training phase, or when the number of in-context examples differs from what is used during training.
Selective "Selective Prediction": Reducing Unnecessary Abstention in Vision-Language Reasoning
Authors: Tejas Srinivasan, Jack Hessel, Tanmay Gupta, Bill Yuchen Lin, Yejin Choi, Jesse Thomason, Khyathi Raghavi Chandu
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Prediction

Selective prediction minimizes incorrect predictions from vision-language models (VLMs) by allowing them to abstain from answering when uncertain. However, when deploying a vision-language system with low tolerance for inaccurate predictions, selective prediction may be over-cautious and abstain too frequently, even on many correct predictions. We introduce ReCoVERR, an inference-time algorithm to reduce the over-abstention of a selective vision-language system without increasing the error rate of the system's predictions. When the VLM makes a low-confidence prediction, instead of abstaining ReCoVERR tries to find relevant clues in the image that provide additional evidence for the prediction. ReCoVERR uses an LLM to pose related questions to the VLM, collects high-confidence evidences, and if enough evidence confirms the prediction the system makes a prediction instead of abstaining. ReCoVERR enables three VLMs (BLIP2, InstructBLIP, and LLaVA-1.5) to answer up to 20% more questions on the VQAv2 and A-OKVQA tasks without decreasing system accuracy, thus improving overall system reliability. Our code is available at https://github.com/tejas1995/ReCoVERR.
Alternating Weak Triphone/BPE Alignment Supervision from Hybrid Model Improves End-to-End ASR
Authors: Jintao Jiang, Yingbo Gao, Mohammad Zeineldeen, Zoltan Tuske
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00

In this paper, alternating weak triphone/BPE alignment supervision is proposed to improve end-to-end model training. Towards this end, triphone and BPE alignments are extracted using a pre-existing hybrid ASR system. Then, regularization effect is obtained by cross-entropy based intermediate auxiliary losses computed on such alignments at a mid-layer representation of the encoder for triphone alignments and at the encoder for BPE alignments. Weak supervision is achieved through strong label smoothing with parameter of 0.5. Experimental results on TED-LIUM 2 indicate that either triphone or BPE alignment based weak supervision improves ASR performance over standard CTC auxiliary loss. Moreover, their combination lowers the word error rate further. We also investigate the alternation of the two auxiliary tasks during model training, and additional performance gain is observed. Overall, the proposed techniques result in over 10% relative error rate reduction over a CTC-regularized baseline system.
Social Convos: Capturing Agendas and Emotions on Social Media
Authors: Ankita Bhaumik, Ning Sa, Gregorios Katsios, Tomek Strzalkowski
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00

Social media platforms are popular tools for disseminating targeted information during major public events like elections or pandemics. Systematic analysis of the message traffic can provide valuable insights into prevailing opinions and social dynamics among different segments of the population. We are specifically interested in influence spread, and in particular whether more deliberate influence operations can be detected. However, filtering out the essential messages with telltale influence indicators from the extensive and often chaotic social media traffic is a major challenge. In this paper we present a novel approach to extract influence indicators from messages circulating among groups of users discussing particular topics. We build upon the concept of a convo to identify influential authors who are actively promoting some particular agenda around that topic within the group. We focus on two influence indicators: the (control of) agenda and the use of emotional language.
Speech Corpus for Korean Children with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Towards Automatic Assessment Systems
Authors: SeonWoo Lee, Jihyun Mun, Sunhee Kim, Minhwa Chung
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00

Despite the growing demand for digital therapeutics for children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), there is currently no speech corpus available for Korean children with ASD. This paper introduces a speech corpus specifically designed for Korean children with ASD, aiming to advance speech technologies such as pronunciation and severity evaluation. Speech recordings from speech and language evaluation sessions were transcribed, and annotated for articulatory and linguistic characteristics. Three speech and language pathologists rated these recordings for social communication severity (SCS) and pronunciation proficiency (PP) using a 3-point Likert scale. The total number of participants will be 300 for children with ASD and 50 for typically developing (TD) children. The paper also analyzes acoustic and linguistic features extracted from speech data collected and completed for annotation from 73 children with ASD and 9 TD children to investigate the characteristics of children with ASD and identify significant features that correlate with the clinical scores. The results reveal some speech and linguistic characteristics in children with ASD that differ from those in TD children or another subgroup of ASD categorized by clinical scores, demonstrating the potential for developing automatic assessment systems for SCS and PP.
Exploratory Landscape Analysis for Mixed-Variable Problems
Authors: Raphael Patrick Prager, Heike Trautmann
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperparameter Optimization

Exploratory landscape analysis and fitness landscape analysis in general have been pivotal in facilitating problem understanding, algorithm design and endeavors such as automated algorithm selection and configuration. These techniques have largely been limited to search spaces of a single domain. In this work, we provide the means to compute exploratory landscape features for mixed-variable problems where the decision space is a mixture of continuous, binary, integer, and categorical variables. This is achieved by utilizing existing encoding techniques originating from machine learning. We provide a comprehensive juxtaposition of the results based on these different techniques. To further highlight their merit for practical applications, we design and conduct an automated algorithm selection study based on a hyperparameter optimization benchmark suite. We derive a meaningful compartmentalization of these benchmark problems by clustering based on the used landscape features. The identified clusters mimic the behavior the used algorithms exhibit. Meaning, the different clusters have different best performing algorithms. Finally, our trained algorithm selector is able to close the gap between the single best and the virtual best solver by 57.5% over all benchmark problems.
Scalable Superconductor Neuron with Ternary Synaptic Connections for Ultra-Fast SNN Hardware
Authors: Mustafa Altay Karamuftuoglu, Beyza Zeynep Ucpinar, Arash Fayyazi, Sasan Razmkhah, Mehdi Kamal, Massoud Pedram
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 4k, Efficient Neural Network

A novel high-fan-in differential superconductor neuron structure designed for ultra-high-performance Spiking Neural Network (SNN) accelerators is presented. Utilizing a high-fan-in neuron structure allows us to design SNN accelerators with more synaptic connections, enhancing the overall network capabilities. The proposed neuron design is based on superconductor electronics fabric, incorporating multiple superconducting loops, each with two Josephson Junctions. This arrangement enables each input data branch to have positive and negative inductive coupling, supporting excitatory and inhibitory synaptic data. Compatibility with synaptic devices and thresholding operation is achieved using a single flux quantum (SFQ) pulse-based logic style. The neuron design, along with ternary synaptic connections, forms the foundation for a superconductor-based SNN inference. To demonstrate the capabilities of our design, we train the SNN using snnTorch, augmenting the PyTorch framework. After pruning, the demonstrated SNN inference achieves an impressive 96.1% accuracy on MNIST images. Notably, the network exhibits a remarkable throughput of 8.92 GHz while consuming only 1.5 nJ per inference, including the energy consumption associated with cooling to 4K. These results underscore the potential of superconductor electronics in developing high-performance and ultra-energy-efficient neural network accelerator architectures.
On the Feasibility of Deep Learning Classification from Raw Signal Data in Radiology, Ultrasonography and Electrophysiology
Authors: Szilard Enyedi
Date: 2024-02-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

Medical imaging is a very useful tool in healthcare, various technologies being employed to non-invasively peek inside the human body. Deep learning with neural networks in radiology was welcome - albeit cautiously - by the radiologist community. Most of the currently deployed or researched deep learning solutions are applied on already generated images of medical scans, use the neural networks to aid in the generation of such images, or use them for identifying specific substance markers in spectrographs. This paper's author posits that if the neural networks were trained directly on the raw signals from the scanning machines, they would gain access to more nuanced information than from the already processed images, hence the training - and later, the inferences - would become more accurate. The paper presents the main current applications of deep learning in radiography, ultrasonography, and electrophysiology, and discusses whether the proposed neural network training directly on raw signals is feasible.
Efficient Online Learning for Networks of Two-Compartment Spiking Neurons
Authors: Yujia Yin, Xinyi Chen, Chenxiang Ma, Jibin Wu, Kay Chen Tan
Date: 2024-02-25 00:00:00

The brain-inspired Spiking Neural Networks (SNNs) have garnered considerable research interest due to their superior performance and energy efficiency in processing temporal signals. Recently, a novel multi-compartment spiking neuron model, namely the Two-Compartment LIF (TC-LIF) model, has been proposed and exhibited a remarkable capacity for sequential modelling. However, training the TC-LIF model presents challenges stemming from the large memory consumption and the issue of gradient vanishing associated with the Backpropagation Through Time (BPTT) algorithm. To address these challenges, online learning methodologies emerge as a promising solution. Yet, to date, the application of online learning methods in SNNs has been predominantly confined to simplified Leaky Integrate-and-Fire (LIF) neuron models. In this paper, we present a novel online learning method specifically tailored for networks of TC-LIF neurons. Additionally, we propose a refined TC-LIF neuron model called Adaptive TC-LIF, which is carefully designed to enhance temporal information integration in online learning scenarios. Extensive experiments, conducted on various sequential benchmarks, demonstrate that our approach successfully preserves the superior sequential modeling capabilities of the TC-LIF neuron while incorporating the training efficiency and hardware friendliness of online learning. As a result, it offers a multitude of opportunities to leverage neuromorphic solutions for processing temporal signals.
A kernel-based analysis of Laplacian Eigenmaps
Authors: Martin Wahl
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00

Given i.i.d. observations uniformly distributed on a closed manifold $\mathcal{M}\subseteq \mathbb{R}^p$, we study the spectral properties of the associated empirical graph Laplacian based on a Gaussian kernel. Our main results are non-asymptotic error bounds, showing that the eigenvalues and eigenspaces of the empirical graph Laplacian are close to the eigenvalues and eigenspaces of the Laplace-Beltrami operator of $\mathcal{M}$. In our analysis, we connect the empirical graph Laplacian to kernel principal component analysis, and consider the heat kernel of $\mathcal{M}$ as reproducing kernel feature map. This leads to novel points of view and allows to leverage results for empirical covariance operators in infinite dimensions.
Inference for Regression with Variables Generated by AI or Machine Learning
Authors: Laura Battaglia, Timothy Christensen, Stephen Hansen, Szymon Sacher
Date: 2024-02-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction, Imputation, Information Retrieval, regression, Retrieval, valid

Researchers now routinely use AI or other machine learning methods to estimate latent variables of economic interest, then plug-in the estimates as covariates in a regression. We show both theoretically and empirically that naively treating AI/ML-generated variables as "data" leads to biased estimates and invalid inference. To restore valid inference, we propose two methods: (1) an explicit bias correction with bias-corrected confidence intervals, and (2) joint estimation of the regression parameters and latent variables. We illustrate these ideas through applications involving label imputation, dimensionality reduction, and index construction via classification and aggregation.
Retrouver l'inventeur-auteur : la lev{é}e d'homonymies d'autorat entre les brevets et les publications scientifiques
Authors: David Reymond, Heman Khouilla, Sandrine Wolff, Manuel Durand-Barthez
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Patent classification

Patents and scientific papers provide an essential source for measuring science and technology output, to be used as a basis for the most varied scientometric analyzes. Authors' and inventors' names are the key identifiers to carry out these analyses, which however, run up against the issue of disambiguation. By extension identifying inventors who are also academic authors is a non-trivial challenge. We propose a method using the International Patent Classification (IPC) and the IPCCAT API to assess the degree of similarity of patents and papers abstracts of a given inventor, in order to match both types of documents. The method is developed and manually qualified based on three corpora of patents extracted from the international EPO database Espacenet. Among a set of 4679 patents and 7720 inventors, we obtain 2501 authors. The proposed algorithm solves the general problem of disambiguation with an error rate lower than 5%.
Effect of utterance duration and phonetic content on speaker identification using second-order statistical methods
Authors: Ivan Magrin-Chagnolleau, Jean François Bonastre, Frédéric Bimbot
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Speaker Identification

Second-order statistical methods show very good results for automatic speaker identification in controlled recording conditions. These approaches are generally used on the entire speech material available. In this paper, we study the influence of the content of the test speech material on the performances of such methods, i.e. under a more analytical approach. The goal is to investigate on the kind of information which is used by these methods, and where it is located in the speech signal. Liquids and glides together, vowels, and more particularly nasal vowels and nasal consonants, are found to be particularly speaker specific: test utterances of 1 second, composed in majority of acoustic material from one of these classes provide better speaker identification results than phonetically balanced test utterances, even though the training is done, in both cases, with 15 seconds of phonetically balanced speech. Nevertheless, results with other phoneme classes are never dramatically poor. These results tend to show that the speaker-dependent information captured by long-term second-order statistics is consistently common to all phonetic classes, and that the homogeneity of the test material may improve the quality of the estimates.
Deep Rating Elicitation for New Users in Collaborative Filtering
Authors: Wonbin Kweon, SeongKu Kang, Junyoung Hwang, Hwanjo Yu
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Collaborative Filtering, Recommendation Systems

Recent recommender systems started to use rating elicitation, which asks new users to rate a small seed itemset for inferring their preferences, to improve the quality of initial recommendations. The key challenge of the rating elicitation is to choose the seed items which can best infer the new users' preference. This paper proposes a novel end-to-end Deep learning framework for Rating Elicitation (DRE), that chooses all the seed items at a time with consideration of the non-linear interactions. To this end, it first defines categorical distributions to sample seed items from the entire itemset, then it trains both the categorical distributions and a neural reconstruction network to infer users' preferences on the remaining items from CF information of the sampled seed items. Through the end-to-end training, the categorical distributions are learned to select the most representative seed items while reflecting the complex non-linear interactions. Experimental results show that DRE outperforms the state-of-the-art approaches in the recommendation quality by accurately inferring the new users' preferences and its seed itemset better represents the latent space than the seed itemset obtained by the other methods.
Confidence Calibration for Recommender Systems and Its Applications
Authors: Wonbin Kweon
Date: 2024-02-26 00:00:00
Tasks: Recommendation Systems

Despite the importance of having a measure of confidence in recommendation results, it has been surprisingly overlooked in the literature compared to the accuracy of the recommendation. In this dissertation, I propose a model calibration framework for recommender systems for estimating accurate confidence in recommendation results based on the learned ranking scores. Moreover, I subsequently introduce two real-world applications of confidence on recommendations: (1) Training a small student model by treating the confidence of a big teacher model as additional learning guidance, (2) Adjusting the number of presented items based on the expected user utility estimated with calibrated probability.