pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Nearly Lossless Adaptive Bit Switching
Authors: Haiduo Huang, Zhenhua Liu, Tian Xia, Wenzhe Zhao, Pengju Ren
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Quantization

Model quantization is widely applied for compressing and accelerating deep neural networks (DNNs). However, conventional Quantization-Aware Training (QAT) focuses on training DNNs with uniform bit-width. The bit-width settings vary across different hardware and transmission demands, which induces considerable training and storage costs. Hence, the scheme of one-shot joint training multiple precisions is proposed to address this issue. Previous works either store a larger FP32 model to switch between different precision models for higher accuracy or store a smaller INT8 model but compromise accuracy due to using shared quantization parameters. In this paper, we introduce the Double Rounding quantization method, which fully utilizes the quantized representation range to accomplish nearly lossless bit-switching while reducing storage by using the highest integer precision instead of full precision. Furthermore, we observe a competitive interference among different precisions during one-shot joint training, primarily due to inconsistent gradients of quantization scales during backward propagation. To tackle this problem, we propose an Adaptive Learning Rate Scaling (ALRS) technique that dynamically adapts learning rates for various precisions to optimize the training process. Additionally, we extend our Double Rounding to one-shot mixed precision training and develop a Hessian-Aware Stochastic Bit-switching (HASB) strategy. Experimental results on the ImageNet-1K classification demonstrate that our methods have enough advantages to state-of-the-art one-shot joint QAT in both multi-precision and mixed-precision. We also validate the feasibility of our method on detection and segmentation tasks, as well as on LLMs task. Our codes are available at https://github.com/haiduo/Double-Rounding.
Uncertainty Quantification of Wind Gust Predictions in the Northeast US: An Evidential Neural Network and Explainable Artificial Intelligence Approach
Authors: Israt Jahan, John S. Schreck, David John Gagne, Charlie Becker, Marina Astitha
Date: 2025-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Prediction Intervals, Uncertainty Quantification

Machine learning has shown promise in reducing bias in numerical weather model predictions of wind gusts. Yet, they underperform to predict high gusts even with additional observations due to the right-skewed distribution of gusts. Uncertainty quantification (UQ) addresses this by identifying when predictions are reliable or needs cautious interpretation. Using data from 61 extratropical storms in the Northeastern USA, we introduce evidential neural network (ENN) as a novel approach for UQ in gust predictions, leveraging atmospheric variables from the Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) model as features and gust observations as targets. Explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) techniques demonstrated that key predictive features also contributed to higher uncertainty. Estimated uncertainty correlated with storm intensity and spatial gust gradients. ENN allowed constructing gust prediction intervals without requiring an ensemble. From an operational perspective, providing gust forecasts with quantified uncertainty enhances stakeholders' confidence in risk assessment and response planning for extreme gust events.
Online Gradient Boosting Decision Tree: In-Place Updates for Efficient Adding/Deleting Data
Authors: Huawei Lin, Jun Woo Chung, Yingjie Lao, Weijie Zhao
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack

Gradient Boosting Decision Tree (GBDT) is one of the most popular machine learning models in various applications. However, in the traditional settings, all data should be simultaneously accessed in the training procedure: it does not allow to add or delete any data instances after training. In this paper, we propose an efficient online learning framework for GBDT supporting both incremental and decremental learning. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that considers an in-place unified incremental and decremental learning on GBDT. To reduce the learning cost, we present a collection of optimizations for our framework, so that it can add or delete a small fraction of data on the fly. We theoretically show the relationship between the hyper-parameters of the proposed optimizations, which enables trading off accuracy and cost on incremental and decremental learning. The backdoor attack results show that our framework can successfully inject and remove backdoor in a well-trained model using incremental and decremental learning, and the empirical results on public datasets confirm the effectiveness and efficiency of our proposed online learning framework and optimizations.
Physics-Inspired Distributed Radio Map Estimation
Authors: Dong Yang, Yue Wang, Songyang Zhang, Yingshu Li, Zhipeng Cai
Date: 2025-02-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning, Physical Intuition

To gain panoramic awareness of spectrum coverage in complex wireless environments, data-driven learning approaches have recently been introduced for radio map estimation (RME). While existing deep learning based methods conduct RME given spectrum measurements gathered from dispersed sensors in the region of interest, they rely on centralized data at a fusion center, which however raises critical concerns on data privacy leakages and high communication overloads. Federated learning (FL) enhance data security and communication efficiency in RME by allowing multiple clients to collaborate in model training without directly sharing local data. However, the performance of the FL-based RME can be hindered by the problem of task heterogeneity across clients due to their unavailable or inaccurate landscaping information. To fill this gap, in this paper, we propose a physics-inspired distributed RME solution in the absence of landscaping information. The main idea is to develop a novel distributed RME framework empowered by leveraging the domain knowledge of radio propagation models, and by designing a new distributed learning approach that splits the entire RME model into two modules. A global autoencoder module is shared among clients to capture the common pathloss influence on radio propagation pattern, while a client-specific autoencoder module focuses on learning the individual features produced by local shadowing effects from the unique building distributions in local environment. Simulation results show that our proposed method outperforms the benchmarks in achieving higher performance.
Self-Prompt SAM: Medical Image Segmentation via Automatic Prompt SAM Adaptation
Authors: Bin Xie, Hao Tang, Dawen Cai, Yan Yan, Gady Agam
Date: 2025-02-02 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Semantic Segmentation

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance and brought a range of unexplored capabilities to natural image segmentation tasks. However, as a very important branch of image segmentation, the performance of SAM remains uncertain when applied to medical image segmentation due to the significant differences between natural images and medical images. Meanwhile, it is harsh to meet the SAM's requirements of extra prompts provided, such as points or boxes to specify medical regions. In this paper, we propose a novel self-prompt SAM adaptation framework for medical image segmentation, named Self-Prompt-SAM. We design a multi-scale prompt generator combined with the image encoder in SAM to generate auxiliary masks. Then, we use the auxiliary masks to generate bounding boxes as box prompts and use Distance Transform to select the most central points as point prompts. Meanwhile, we design a 3D depth-fused adapter (DfusedAdapter) and inject the DFusedAdapter into each transformer in the image encoder and mask decoder to enable pre-trained 2D SAM models to extract 3D information and adapt to 3D medical images. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance and outperforms nnUNet by 2.3% on AMOS2022, 1.6% on ACDCand 0.5% on Synapse datasets.
The ALCHEmist: Automated Labeling 500x CHEaper Than LLM Data Annotators
Authors: Tzu-Heng Huang, Catherine Cao, Vaishnavi Bhargava, Frederic Sala
Date: 2024-06-25 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large pretrained models can be used as annotators, helping replace or augment crowdworkers and enabling distilling generalist models into smaller specialist models. Unfortunately, this comes at a cost: employing top-of-the-line models often requires paying thousands of dollars for API calls, while the resulting datasets are static and challenging to audit. To address these challenges, we propose a simple alternative: rather than directly querying labels from pretrained models, we task models to generate programs that can produce labels. These programs can be stored and applied locally, re-used and extended, and cost orders of magnitude less. Our system, Alchemist, obtains comparable to or better performance than large language model-based annotation in a range of tasks for a fraction of the cost: on average, improvements amount to a 12.9% enhancement while the total labeling costs across all datasets are reduced by a factor of approximately 500x.
Detection, Retrieval, and Explanation Unified: A Violence Detection System Based on Knowledge Graphs and GAT
Authors: Wen-Dong Jiang, Chih-Yung Chang, Diptendu Sinha Roy
Date: 2025-01-07 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Attention, Knowledge Graphs, Large Language Model, Retrieval

Recently, violence detection systems developed using unified multimodal models have achieved significant success and attracted widespread attention. However, most of these systems face two critical challenges: the lack of interpretability as black-box models and limited functionality, offering only classification or retrieval capabilities. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a novel interpretable violence detection system, termed the Three-in-One (TIO) System. The TIO system integrates knowledge graphs (KG) and graph attention networks (GAT) to provide three core functionalities: detection, retrieval, and explanation. Specifically, the system processes each video frame along with text descriptions generated by a large language model (LLM) for videos containing potential violent behavior. It employs ImageBind to generate high-dimensional embeddings for constructing a knowledge graph, uses GAT for reasoning, and applies lightweight time series modules to extract video embedding features. The final step connects a classifier and retriever for multi-functional outputs. The interpretability of KG enables the system to verify the reasoning process behind each output. Additionally, the paper introduces several lightweight methods to reduce the resource consumption of the TIO system and enhance its efficiency. Extensive experiments conducted on the XD-Violence and UCF-Crime datasets validate the effectiveness of the proposed system. A case study further reveals an intriguing phenomenon: as the number of bystanders increases, the occurrence of violent behavior tends to decrease.
Activation Sparsity Opportunities for Compressing General Large Language Models
Authors: Nobel Dhar, Bobin Deng, Md Romyull Islam, Kazi Fahim Ahmad Nasif, Liang Zhao, Kun Suo
Date: 2024-12-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Model Compression

Deploying local AI models, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), to edge devices can substantially enhance devices' independent capabilities, alleviate the server's burden, and lower the response time. Owing to these tremendous potentials, many big tech companies have released several lightweight Small Language Models (SLMs) to bridge this gap. However, we still have huge motivations to deploy more powerful (LLMs) AI models on edge devices and enhance their smartness level. Unlike the conventional approaches for AI model compression, we investigate activation sparsity. The activation sparsity method is orthogonal and combinable with existing techniques to maximize the compression rate while maintaining great accuracy. LLMs' Feed-Forward Network (FFN) components, which typically comprise a large proportion of parameters (around 2/3), ensure that our FFN optimizations would have a better chance of achieving effective compression. Moreover, our findings are beneficial to general LLMs and are not restricted to ReLU-based models. This work systematically investigates the tradeoff between enforcing activation sparsity and perplexity (accuracy) on state-of-the-art LLMs. Our empirical analysis demonstrates that we can obtain around 50% of main memory and computing reductions for critical FFN components with negligible accuracy degradation. This extra 50% sparsity does not naturally exist in the current LLMs, which require tuning LLMs' activation outputs by injecting zero-enforcing thresholds. To obtain the benefits of activation sparsity, we provide a guideline for the system architect for LLM prediction and prefetching. The success prediction allows the system to prefetch the necessary weights while omitting the inactive ones and their successors, therefore lowering cache and memory pollution and reducing LLM execution time on resource-constrained edge devices.
Mutual Information Preserving Neural Network Pruning
Authors: Charles Westphal, Stephen Hailes, Mirco Musolesi
Date: 2024-10-31 00:00:00
Tasks: Network Pruning

Pruning has emerged as the primary approach used to limit the resource requirements of large neural networks (NNs). Since the proposal of the lottery ticket hypothesis, researchers have focused either on pruning at initialization or after training. However, recent theoretical findings have shown that the sample efficiency of robust pruned models is proportional to the mutual information (MI) between the pruning masks and the model's training datasets, \textit{whether at initialization or after training}. In this paper, starting from these results, we introduce Mutual Information Preserving Pruning (MIPP), a structured activation-based pruning technique applicable before or after training. The core principle of MIPP is to select nodes in a way that conserves MI shared between the activations of adjacent layers, and consequently between the data and masks. Approaching the pruning problem in this manner means we can prove that there exists a function that can map the pruned upstream layer's activations to the downstream layer's, implying re-trainability. We demonstrate that MIPP consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods, regardless of whether pruning is performed before or after training.
What is a Digital Twin Anyway? Deriving the Definition for the Built Environment from over 15,000 Scientific Publications
Authors: Mahmoud Abdelrahman, Edgardo Macatulad, Binyu Lei, Matias Quintana, Clayton Miller, Filip Biljecki
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

The concept of digital twins has attracted significant attention across various domains, particularly within the built environment. However, there is a sheer volume of definitions and the terminological consensus remains out of reach. The lack of a universally accepted definition leads to ambiguities in their conceptualization and implementation, and may cause miscommunication for both researchers and practitioners. We employed Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to systematically extract and analyze definitions of digital twins from a corpus of more than 15,000 full-text articles spanning diverse disciplines. The study compares these findings with insights from an expert survey that included 52 experts. The study identifies concurrence on the components that comprise a ``Digital Twin'' from a practical perspective across various domains, contrasting them with those that do not, to identify deviations. We investigate the evolution of digital twin definitions over time and across different scales, including manufacturing, building, and urban/geospatial perspectives. We extracted the main components of Digital Twins using Text Frequency Analysis and N-gram analysis. Subsequently, we identified components that appeared in the literature and conducted a Chi-square test to assess the significance of each component in different domains. Our analysis identified key components of digital twins and revealed significant variations in definitions based on application domains, such as manufacturing, building, and urban contexts. The analysis of DT components reveal two major groups of DT types: High-Performance Real-Time (HPRT) DTs, and Long-Term Decision Support (LTDS) DTs. Contrary to common assumptions, we found that components such as simulation, AI/ML, real-time capabilities, and bi-directional data flow are not yet fully mature in the digital twins of the built environment.
AdaSVD: Adaptive Singular Value Decomposition for Large Language Models
Authors: Li Zhiteng, Xia Mingyuan, Zhang Jingyuan, Hui Zheng, Kong Linghe, Zhang Yulun, Yang Xiaokang
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their substantial memory requirements present significant challenges for deployment on resource-constrained devices. Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) has emerged as a promising compression technique for LLMs, offering considerable reductions in memory overhead. However, existing SVD-based methods often struggle to effectively mitigate the errors introduced by SVD truncation, leading to a noticeable performance gap when compared to the original models. Furthermore, applying a uniform compression ratio across all transformer layers fails to account for the varying importance of different layers. To address these challenges, we propose AdaSVD, an adaptive SVD-based LLM compression approach. Specifically, AdaSVD introduces adaComp, which adaptively compensates for SVD truncation errors by alternately updating the singular matrices U and V^T. Additionally, AdaSVD introduces adaCR, which adaptively assigns layer-specific compression ratios based on the relative importance of each layer. Extensive experiments across multiple LLM families and evaluation metrics demonstrate that AdaSVD consistently outperforms state-of-the-art (SOTA) SVD-based methods, achieving superior performance with significantly reduced memory requirements. The code and models will be available at https://github.com/ZHITENGLI/AdaSVD.
PSSD: Making Large Language Models Self-denial via Human Psyche Structure
Authors: Jinzhi Liao, Zenghua Liao, Xiang Zhao
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00

The enhance of accuracy in reasoning results of LLMs arouses the community's interests, wherein pioneering studies investigate post-hoc strategies to rectify potential mistakes. Despite extensive efforts, they are all stuck in a state of resource competition demanding significant time and computing expenses. The cause of the situation lies in the failure of identifying the fundamental feature of the solutions in this line, coined as the self-denial of LLMs. In other words, LLMs should confidently determine the potential existence of mistakes and carefully execute the targeted correction. As the whole procedure conducts within LLMs, supporting and persuasive references are hard to acquire, while the absence of specific steps towards refining hidden mistakes persists even when errors are acknowledged. In response to the challenges, we present PSSD, which refers to and implements the human psyche structure such that three distinct and interconnected roles contribute to human reasoning. Specifically, PSSD leverages the recent multi-agent paradigm, and is further enhanced with three innovatively conceived roles: (1) the intuition-based id role that provides initial attempts based on benign LLMs; (2) the rule-driven superego role that summarizes rules to regulate the above attempts, and returns specific key points as guidance; and (3) the script-centric ego role that absorbs all procedural information to generate executable script for the final answer prediction. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed design not only better enhance reasoning capabilities, but also seamlessly integrate with current models, leading to superior performance.
Hybrid Firefly Algorithm and Sperm Swarm Optimization Algorithm using Newton-Raphson Method (HFASSON) and its application in CR-VANET
Authors: Rehannara Beegum T, Mohd Yamani Idna Idris, Mohamad Nizam Bin Ayub, Hisham A Shehadeh, Usman Ali
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00

This paper proposes a new hybrid algorithm, combining FA, SSO, and the N-R method to accelerate convergence towards global optima, named the Hybrid Firefly Algorithm and Sperm Swarm Optimization with Newton-Raphson (HFASSON). The performance of HFASSON is evaluated using 23 benchmark functions from the CEC 2017 suite, tested in 30, 50, and 100 dimensions. A statistical comparison is performed to assess the effectiveness of HFASSON against FA, SSO, HFASSO, and five hybrid algorithms: Water Cycle Moth Flame Optimization (WCMFO), Hybrid Particle Swarm Optimization and Genetic Algorithm (HPSOGA), Hybrid Sperm Swarm Optimization and Gravitational Search Algorithm (HSSOGSA), Grey Wolf and Cuckoo Search Algorithm (GWOCS), and Hybrid Firefly Genetic Algorithm (FAGA). Results from the Friedman rank test show the superior performance of HFASSON. Additionally, HFASSON is applied to Cognitive Radio Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (CR-VANET), outperforming basic CR-VANET in spectrum utilization. These findings demonstrate HFASSON's efficiency in wireless network applications.
SPFFNet: Strip Perception and Feature Fusion Spatial Pyramid Pooling for Fabric Defect Detection
Authors: Peizhe Zhao
Date: 2025-02-03 00:00:00
Tasks: Defect Detection

Defect detection in fabrics is critical for quality control, yet existing methods often struggle with complex backgrounds and shape-specific defects. In this paper, we propose an improved fabric defect detection model based on YOLOv4. To enhance the detection of strip defects, we introduce a Strip Perception Module (SPM) that improves feature capture through multi-scale convolution. We further enhance the spatial pyramid pooling fast (SPPF) by integrating a squeeze-and-excitation mechanism, resulting in the SE-SPPF module, which better integrates spatial and channel information for more effective defect feature extraction. Additionally, we propose a novel focal enhanced complete intersection over union (FECIoU) metric with adaptive weights, addressing scale differences and class imbalance by adjusting the weights of hard-to-detect instances through focal loss. Experimental results demonstrate that our model achieves a 0.8-8.1% improvement in mean average precision (mAP) on the Tianchi dataset and a 1.6-13.2% improvement on our custom dataset, outperforming other state-of-the-art methods.