pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Inverse Deep Learning Ray Tracing for Heliostat Surface Prediction
Authors: Jan Lewen, Max Pargmann, Mehdi Cherti, Jenia Jitsev, Robert Pitz-Paal, Daniel Maldonado Quinto
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Prediction

Concentrating Solar Power (CSP) plants play a crucial role in the global transition towards sustainable energy. A key factor in ensuring the safe and efficient operation of CSP plants is the distribution of concentrated flux density on the receiver. However, the non-ideal flux density generated by individual heliostats can undermine the safety and efficiency of the power plant. The flux density from each heliostat is influenced by its precise surface profile, which includes factors such as canting and mirror errors. Accurately measuring these surface profiles for a large number of heliostats in operation is a formidable challenge. Consequently, control systems often rely on the assumption of ideal surface conditions, which compromises both safety and operational efficiency. In this study, we introduce inverse Deep Learning Ray Tracing (iDLR), an innovative method designed to predict heliostat surfaces based solely on target images obtained during heliostat calibration. Our simulation-based investigation demonstrates that sufficient information regarding the heliostat surface is retained in the flux density distribution of a single heliostat, enabling deep learning models to accurately predict the underlying surface with deflectometry-like precision for the majority of heliostats. Additionally, we assess the limitations of this method, particularly in relation to surface accuracy and resultant flux density predictions. Furthermore, we are presenting a new comprehensive heliostat model using Non-Uniform Rational B-Spline (NURBS) that has the potential to become the new State of the Art for heliostat surface parameterization. Our findings reveal that iDLR has significant potential to enhance CSP plant operations, potentially increasing the overall efficiency and energy output of the power plants.
Understanding the Skills Gap between Higher Education and Industry in the UK in Artificial Intelligence Sector
Authors: Khushi Jaiswal, Ievgeniia Kuzminykh, Sanjay Modgil
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) changes how businesses work, there is a growing need for people who can work in this sector. This paper investigates how well universities in United Kingdom offering courses in AI, prepare students for jobs in the real world. To gain insight into the differences between university curricula and industry demands we review the contents of taught courses and job advertisement portals. By using custom data scraping tools to gather information from job advertisements and university curricula, and frequency and Naive Bayes classifier analysis, this study will show exactly what skills industry is looking for. In this study we identified 12 skill categories that were used for mapping. The study showed that the university curriculum in the AI domain is well balanced in most technical skills, including Programming and Machine learning subjects, but have a gap in Data Science and Maths and Statistics skill categories.
Just a Hint: Point-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection
Authors: Huafeng Chen, Dian Shao, Guangqian Guo, Shan Gao
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Object, object-detection, Object Detection

Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) demands models to expeditiously and accurately distinguish objects which conceal themselves seamlessly in the environment. Owing to the subtle differences and ambiguous boundaries, COD is not only a remarkably challenging task for models but also for human annotators, requiring huge efforts to provide pixel-wise annotations. To alleviate the heavy annotation burden, we propose to fulfill this task with the help of only one point supervision. Specifically, by swiftly clicking on each object, we first adaptively expand the original point-based annotation to a reasonable hint area. Then, to avoid partial localization around discriminative parts, we propose an attention regulator to scatter model attention to the whole object through partially masking labeled regions. Moreover, to solve the unstable feature representation of camouflaged objects under only point-based annotation, we perform unsupervised contrastive learning based on differently augmented image pairs (e.g. changing color or doing translation). On three mainstream COD benchmarks, experimental results show that our model outperforms several weakly-supervised methods by a large margin across various metrics.
Flexora: Flexible Low Rank Adaptation for Large Language Models
Authors: Chenxing Wei, Yao Shu, Ying Tiffany He, Fei Richard Yu
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Hyperparameter Optimization

Large Language Models (LLMs) are driving advancements in artificial intelligence by increasing the scale of model parameters, which has significantly enhanced generalization ability and unlocked new capabilities in practice. However, their performance in specific downstream tasks is usually hindered by their knowledge boundaries on these tasks. Thus, fine-tuning techniques, especially the widely used Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) method, have been introduced to expand the boundaries on these tasks, whereas LoRA would underperform on certain tasks owing to its potential overfitting on these tasks. To overcome this overfitting and improve the performance of LoRA, we propose the flexible low rank adaptation (Flexora) method to automatically and flexibly select the most important layers needing to be fine-tuned to achieve the best performance on different downstream tasks. Specifically, Flexora firstly frames this layer selection problem as a well-defined hyperparameter optimization (HPO) problem, then addresses it using the unrolled differentiation (UD) method, and finally selects the most useful layers based on the optimized hyperparameters. Our extensive experiments on many pretrained models and natural language tasks show that Flexora is able to consistently improve over the existing baselines, indicating the effectiveness of our Flexora in practice. We additionally provide insightful theoretical results and many ablation studies to deliver a comprehensive understanding of our Flexora.
kNN Retrieval for Simple and Effective Zero-Shot Multi-speaker Text-to-Speech
Authors: Karl El Hajal, Ajinkya Kulkarni, Enno Hermann, Mathew Magimai. -Doss
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Retrieval, Self-Supervised Learning, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Voice Cloning, Zero-Shot Multi-Speaker TTS

While recent zero-shot multi-speaker text-to-speech (TTS) models achieve impressive results, they typically rely on extensive transcribed speech datasets from numerous speakers and intricate training pipelines. Meanwhile, self-supervised learning (SSL) speech features have emerged as effective intermediate representations for TTS. Further, SSL features from different speakers that are linearly close share phonetic information while maintaining individual speaker identity. In this study, we introduce kNN-TTS, a simple and effective framework for zero-shot multi-speaker TTS using retrieval methods which leverage the linear relationships between SSL features. Objective and subjective evaluations show that our models, trained on transcribed speech from a single speaker only, achieve performance comparable to state-of-the-art models that are trained on significantly larger training datasets. The low training data requirements mean that kNN-TTS is well suited for the development of multi-speaker TTS systems for low-resource domains and languages. We also introduce an interpolation parameter which enables fine-grained voice morphing. Demo samples are available at https://idiap.github.io/knn-tts
SAM-COD: SAM-guided Unified Framework for Weakly-Supervised Camouflaged Object Detection
Authors: Huafeng Chen, Pengxu Wei, Guangqian Guo, Shan Gao
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, object-detection, Object Detection

Most Camouflaged Object Detection (COD) methods heavily rely on mask annotations, which are time-consuming and labor-intensive to acquire. Existing weakly-supervised COD approaches exhibit significantly inferior performance compared to fully-supervised methods and struggle to simultaneously support all the existing types of camouflaged object labels, including scribbles, bounding boxes, and points. Even for Segment Anything Model (SAM), it is still problematic to handle the weakly-supervised COD and it typically encounters challenges of prompt compatibility of the scribble labels, extreme response, semantically erroneous response, and unstable feature representations, producing unsatisfactory results in camouflaged scenes. To mitigate these issues, we propose a unified COD framework in this paper, termed SAM-COD, which is capable of supporting arbitrary weakly-supervised labels. Our SAM-COD employs a prompt adapter to handle scribbles as prompts based on SAM. Meanwhile, we introduce response filter and semantic matcher modules to improve the quality of the masks obtained by SAM under COD prompts. To alleviate the negative impacts of inaccurate mask predictions, a new strategy of prompt-adaptive knowledge distillation is utilized to ensure a reliable feature representation. To validate the effectiveness of our approach, we have conducted extensive empirical experiments on three mainstream COD benchmarks. The results demonstrate the superiority of our method against state-of-the-art weakly-supervised and even fully-supervised methods.
Generating Synthetic Fair Syntax-agnostic Data by Learning and Distilling Fair Representation
Authors: Md Fahim Sikder, Resmi Ramachandranpillai, Daniel de Leng, Fredrik Heintz
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Knowledge Distillation

Data Fairness is a crucial topic due to the recent wide usage of AI powered applications. Most of the real-world data is filled with human or machine biases and when those data are being used to train AI models, there is a chance that the model will reflect the bias in the training data. Existing bias-mitigating generative methods based on GANs, Diffusion models need in-processing fairness objectives and fail to consider computational overhead while choosing computationally-heavy architectures, which may lead to high computational demands, instability and poor optimization performance. To mitigate this issue, in this work, we present a fair data generation technique based on knowledge distillation, where we use a small architecture to distill the fair representation in the latent space. The idea of fair latent space distillation enables more flexible and stable training of Fair Generative Models (FGMs). We first learn a syntax-agnostic (for any data type) fair representation of the data, followed by distillation in the latent space into a smaller model. After distillation, we use the distilled fair latent space to generate high-fidelity fair synthetic data. While distilling, we employ quality loss (for fair distillation) and utility loss (for data utility) to ensure that the fairness and data utility characteristics remain in the distilled latent space. Our approaches show a 5%, 5% and 10% rise in performance in fairness, synthetic sample quality and data utility, respectively, than the state-of-the-art fair generative model.
Security Assessment of Hierarchical Federated Deep Learning
Authors: D Alqattan, R Sun, H Liang, G Nicosia, V Snasel, R Ranjan, V Ojha
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Federated Learning

Hierarchical federated learning (HFL) is a promising distributed deep learning model training paradigm, but it has crucial security concerns arising from adversarial attacks. This research investigates and assesses the security of HFL using a novel methodology by focusing on its resilience against adversarial attacks inference-time and training-time. Through a series of extensive experiments across diverse datasets and attack scenarios, we uncover that HFL demonstrates robustness against untargeted training-time attacks due to its hierarchical structure. However, targeted attacks, particularly backdoor attacks, exploit this architecture, especially when malicious clients are positioned in the overlapping coverage areas of edge servers. Consequently, HFL shows a dual nature in its resilience, showcasing its capability to recover from attacks thanks to its hierarchical aggregation that strengthens its suitability for adversarial training, thereby reinforcing its resistance against inference-time attacks. These insights underscore the necessity for balanced security strategies in HFL systems, leveraging their inherent strengths while effectively mitigating vulnerabilities.
Pluto and Charon: A Time and Memory Efficient Collaborative Edge AI Framework for Personal LLMs Fine-Tuning
Authors: Bei Ouyang, Shengyuan Ye, Liekang Zeng, Tianyi Qian, Jingyi Li, Xu Chen
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: parameter-efficient fine-tuning

Large language models (LLMs) have unlocked a plethora of powerful applications at the network edge, such as intelligent personal assistants. Data privacy and security concerns have prompted a shift towards edge-based fine-tuning of personal LLMs, away from cloud reliance. However, this raises issues of computational intensity and resource scarcity, hindering training efficiency and feasibility. While current studies investigate parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) techniques to mitigate resource constraints, our analysis indicates that these techniques are not sufficiently resource-efficient for edge devices. To tackle these challenges, we propose Pluto and Charon (PAC), a time and memory efficient collaborative edge AI framework for personal LLMs fine-tuning. PAC breaks the resource wall of personal LLMs fine-tuning with a sophisticated algorithm-system co-design. (1) Algorithmically, PAC implements a personal LLMs fine-tuning technique that is efficient in terms of parameters, time, and memory. It utilizes Parallel Adapters to circumvent the need for a full backward pass through the LLM backbone. Additionally, an activation cache mechanism further streamlining the process by negating the necessity for repeated forward passes across multiple epochs. (2) Systematically, PAC leverages edge devices in close proximity, pooling them as a collective resource for in-situ personal LLMs fine-tuning, utilizing a hybrid data and pipeline parallelism to orchestrate distributed training. The use of the activation cache eliminates the need for forward pass through the LLM backbone,enabling exclusive fine-tuning of the Parallel Adapters using data parallelism. Extensive evaluation based on prototype implementation demonstrates that PAC remarkably outperforms state-of-the-art approaches, achieving up to 8.64x end-to-end speedup and up to 88.16% reduction in memory footprint.
Towards Efficient Large Language Models for Scientific Text: A Review
Authors: Huy Quoc To, Ming Liu, Guangyan Huang
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) have ushered in a new era for processing complex information in various fields, including science. The increasing amount of scientific literature allows these models to acquire and understand scientific knowledge effectively, thus improving their performance in a wide range of tasks. Due to the power of LLMs, they require extremely expensive computational resources, intense amounts of data, and training time. Therefore, in recent years, researchers have proposed various methodologies to make scientific LLMs more affordable. The most well-known approaches align in two directions. It can be either focusing on the size of the models or enhancing the quality of data. To date, a comprehensive review of these two families of methods has not yet been undertaken. In this paper, we (I) summarize the current advances in the emerging abilities of LLMs into more accessible AI solutions for science, and (II) investigate the challenges and opportunities of developing affordable solutions for scientific domains using LLMs.
Quantum Artificial Intelligence: A Brief Survey
Authors: Matthias Klusch, Jörg Lässig, Daniel Müssig, Antonio Macaluso, Frank K. Wilhelm
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Survey

Quantum Artificial Intelligence (QAI) is the intersection of quantum computing and AI, a technological synergy with expected significant benefits for both. In this paper, we provide a brief overview of what has been achieved in QAI so far and point to some open questions for future research. In particular, we summarize some major key findings on the feasability and the potential of using quantum computing for solving computationally hard problems in various subfields of AI, and vice versa, the leveraging of AI methods for building and operating quantum computing devices.
MEGen: Generative Backdoor in Large Language Models via Model Editing
Authors: Jiyang Qiu, Xinbei Ma, Zhuosheng Zhang, Hai Zhao
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Backdoor Attack, Language Modelling, Model Editing

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities. Their powerful generative abilities enable flexible responses based on various queries or instructions. Emerging as widely adopted generalists for diverse tasks, LLMs are still vulnerable to backdoors. This paper proposes an editing-based generative backdoor, named MEGen, aiming to create a customized backdoor for NLP tasks with the least side effects. In our approach, we first leverage a language model to insert a trigger selected on fixed metrics into the input, then design a pipeline of model editing to directly embed a backdoor into an LLM. By adjusting a small set of local parameters with a mini-batch of samples, MEGen significantly enhances time efficiency and achieves high robustness. Experimental results indicate that our backdoor attack strategy achieves a high attack success rate on poison data while maintaining the model's performance on clean data. Notably, the backdoored model, when triggered, can freely output pre-set dangerous information while successfully completing downstream tasks. This suggests that future LLM applications could be guided to deliver certain dangerous information, thus altering the LLM's generative style. We believe this approach provides insights for future LLM applications and the execution of backdoor attacks on conversational AI systems.
Towards Foundation Models for the Industrial Forecasting of Chemical Kinetics
Authors: Imran Nasim, Joaõ Lucas de Sousa Almeida
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

Scientific Machine Learning is transforming traditional engineering industries by enhancing the efficiency of existing technologies and accelerating innovation, particularly in modeling chemical reactions. Despite recent advancements, the issue of solving stiff chemically reacting problems within computational fluid dynamics remains a significant issue. In this study we propose a novel approach utilizing a multi-layer-perceptron mixer architecture (MLP-Mixer) to model the time-series of stiff chemical kinetics. We evaluate this method using the ROBER system, a benchmark model in chemical kinetics, to compare its performance with traditional numerical techniques. This study provides insight into the industrial utility of the recently developed MLP-Mixer architecture to model chemical kinetics and provides motivation for such neural architecture to be used as a base for time-series foundation models.
Fine-Tuning a Local LLaMA-3 Large Language Model for Automated Privacy-Preserving Physician Letter Generation in Radiation Oncology
Authors: Yihao Hou, Christoph Bert, Ahmed Gomaa, Godehard Lahmer, Daniel Hoefler, Thomas Weissmann, Raphaela Voigt, Philipp Schubert, Charlotte Schmitter, Alina Depardon, Sabine Semrau, Andreas Maier, Rainer Fietkau, Yixing Huang, Florian Putz
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Privacy Preserving

Generating physician letters is a time-consuming task in daily clinical practice. This study investigates local fine-tuning of large language models (LLMs), specifically LLaMA models, for physician letter generation in a privacy-preserving manner within the field of radiation oncology. Our findings demonstrate that base LLaMA models, without fine-tuning, are inadequate for effectively generating physician letters. The QLoRA algorithm provides an efficient method for local intra-institutional fine-tuning of LLMs with limited computational resources (i.e., a single 48 GB GPU workstation within the hospital). The fine-tuned LLM successfully learns radiation oncology-specific information and generates physician letters in an institution-specific style. ROUGE scores of the generated summary reports highlight the superiority of the 8B LLaMA-3 model over the 13B LLaMA-2 model. Further multidimensional physician evaluations of 10 cases reveal that, although the fine-tuned LLaMA-3 model has limited capacity to generate content beyond the provided input data, it successfully generates salutations, diagnoses and treatment histories, recommendations for further treatment, and planned schedules. Overall, clinical benefit was rated highly by the clinical experts (average score of 3.44 on a 4-point scale). With careful physician review and correction, automated LLM-based physician letter generation has significant practical value.
Offline Model-Based Reinforcement Learning with Anti-Exploration
Authors: Padmanaba Srinivasan, William Knottenbelt
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: D4RL, model, Model-based Reinforcement Learning, Offline RL, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Model-based reinforcement learning (MBRL) algorithms learn a dynamics model from collected data and apply it to generate synthetic trajectories to enable faster learning. This is an especially promising paradigm in offline reinforcement learning (RL) where data may be limited in quantity, in addition to being deficient in coverage and quality. Practical approaches to offline MBRL usually rely on ensembles of dynamics models to prevent exploitation of any individual model and to extract uncertainty estimates that penalize values in states far from the dataset support. Uncertainty estimates from ensembles can vary greatly in scale, making it challenging to generalize hyperparameters well across even similar tasks. In this paper, we present Morse Model-based offline RL (MoMo), which extends the anti-exploration paradigm found in offline model-free RL to the model-based space. We develop model-free and model-based variants of MoMo and show how the model-free version can be extended to detect and deal with out-of-distribution (OOD) states using explicit uncertainty estimation without the need for large ensembles. MoMo performs offline MBRL using an anti-exploration bonus to counteract value overestimation in combination with a policy constraint, as well as a truncation function to terminate synthetic rollouts that are excessively OOD. Experimentally, we find that both model-free and model-based MoMo perform well, and the latter outperforms prior model-based and model-free baselines on the majority of D4RL datasets tested.