pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Sound Event Detection and Localization with Distance Estimation
Authors: Daniel Aleksander Krause, Archontis Politis, Annamaria Mesaros
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Event Detection, Sound Event Detection

Sound Event Detection and Localization (SELD) is a combined task of identifying sound events and their corresponding direction-of-arrival (DOA). While this task has numerous applications and has been extensively researched in recent years, it fails to provide full information about the sound source position. In this paper, we overcome this problem by extending the task to Sound Event Detection, Localization with Distance Estimation (3D SELD). We study two ways of integrating distance estimation within the SELD core - a multi-task approach, in which the problem is tackled by a separate model output, and a single-task approach obtained by extending the multi-ACCDOA method to include distance information. We investigate both methods for the Ambisonic and binaural versions of STARSS23: Sony-TAU Realistic Spatial Soundscapes 2023. Moreover, our study involves experiments on the loss function related to the distance estimation part. Our results show that it is possible to perform 3D SELD without any degradation of performance in sound event detection and DOA estimation.
The Real Tropical Geometry of Neural Networks
Authors: Marie-Charlotte Brandenburg, Georg Loho, Guido Montúfar
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00

We consider a binary classifier defined as the sign of a tropical rational function, that is, as the difference of two convex piecewise linear functions. The parameter space of ReLU neural networks is contained as a semialgebraic set inside the parameter space of tropical rational functions. We initiate the study of two different subdivisions of this parameter space: a subdivision into semialgebraic sets, on which the combinatorial type of the decision boundary is fixed, and a subdivision into a polyhedral fan, capturing the combinatorics of the partitions of the dataset. The sublevel sets of the 0/1-loss function arise as subfans of this classification fan, and we show that the level-sets are not necessarily connected. We describe the classification fan i) geometrically, as normal fan of the activation polytope, and ii) combinatorially through a list of properties of associated bipartite graphs, in analogy to covector axioms of oriented matroids and tropical oriented matroids. Our findings extend and refine the connection between neural networks and tropical geometry by observing structures established in real tropical geometry, such as positive tropicalizations of hypersurfaces and tropical semialgebraic sets.
Graph Neural Network for Neutrino Physics Event Reconstruction
Authors: V Hewes, Adam Aurisano, Giuseppe Cerati, Jim Kowalkowski, Claire Lee, Wei-keng Liao, Daniel Grzenda, Kaushal Gumpula, Xiaohe Zhang
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Graph Neural Network

Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) detector technology offers a wealth of high-resolution information on particle interactions, and leveraging that information to its full potential requires sophisticated automated reconstruction techniques. This article describes NuGraph2, a Graph Neural Network (GNN) for low-level reconstruction of simulated neutrino interactions in a LArTPC detector. Simulated neutrino interactions in the MicroBooNE detector geometry are described as heterogeneous graphs, with energy depositions on each detector plane forming nodes on planar subgraphs. The network utilizes a multi-head attention message-passing mechanism to perform background filtering and semantic labelling on these graph nodes, identifying those associated with the primary physics interaction with 98.0\% efficiency and labelling them according to particle type with 94.9\% efficiency. The network operates directly on detector observables across multiple 2D representations, but utilizes a 3D-context-aware mechanism to encourage consistency between these representations. Model inference takes 0.12~s/event on a CPU, and 0.005s/event batched on a GPU. This architecture is designed to be a general-purpose solution for particle reconstruction in neutrino physics, with the potential for deployment across a broad range of detector technologies, and offers a core convolution engine that can be leveraged for a variety of tasks beyond the two described in this article.
VITaL Pretraining: Visuo-Tactile Pretraining for Tactile and Non-Tactile Manipulation Policies
Authors: Abraham George, Selam Gano, Pranav Katragadda, Amir Barati Farimani
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Imitation Learning

Tactile information is a critical tool for dexterous manipulation. As humans, we rely heavily on tactile information to understand objects in our environments and how to interact with them. We use touch not only to perform manipulation tasks but also to learn how to perform these tasks. Therefore, to create robotic agents that can learn to complete manipulation tasks at a human or super-human level of performance, we need to properly incorporate tactile information into both skill execution and skill learning. In this paper, we investigate how we can incorporate tactile information into imitation learning platforms to improve performance on manipulation tasks. We show that incorporating visuo-tactile pretraining improves imitation learning performance, not only for tactile agents (policies that use tactile information at inference), but also for non-tactile agents (policies that do not use tactile information at inference). For these non-tactile agents, pretraining with tactile information significantly improved performance (for example, improving the accuracy on USB plugging from 20% to 85%), reaching a level on par with visuo-tactile agents, and even surpassing them in some cases. For demonstration videos and access to our codebase, see the project website: https://sites.google.com/andrew.cmu.edu/visuo-tactile-pretraining
Distill2Explain: Differentiable decision trees for explainable reinforcement learning in energy application controllers
Authors: Gargya Gokhale, Seyed Soroush Karimi Madahi, Bert Claessens, Chris Develder
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: energy management, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Demand-side flexibility is gaining importance as a crucial element in the energy transition process. Accounting for about 25% of final energy consumption globally, the residential sector is an important (potential) source of energy flexibility. However, unlocking this flexibility requires developing a control framework that (1) easily scales across different houses, (2) is easy to maintain, and (3) is simple to understand for end-users. A potential control framework for such a task is data-driven control, specifically model-free reinforcement learning (RL). Such RL-based controllers learn a good control policy by interacting with their environment, learning purely based on data and with minimal human intervention. Yet, they lack explainability, which hampers user acceptance. Moreover, limited hardware capabilities of residential assets forms a hurdle (e.g., using deep neural networks). To overcome both those challenges, we propose a novel method to obtain explainable RL policies by using differentiable decision trees. Using a policy distillation approach, we train these differentiable decision trees to mimic standard RL-based controllers, leading to a decision tree-based control policy that is data-driven and easy to explain. As a proof-of-concept, we examine the performance and explainability of our proposed approach in a battery-based home energy management system to reduce energy costs. For this use case, we show that our proposed approach can outperform baseline rule-based policies by about 20-25%, while providing simple, explainable control policies. We further compare these explainable policies with standard RL policies and examine the performance trade-offs associated with this increased explainability.
State space representations of the Roesser type for convolutional layers
Authors: Patricia Pauli, Dennis Gramlich, Frank Allgöwer
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00

From the perspective of control theory, convolutional layers (of neural networks) are 2-D (or N-D) linear time-invariant dynamical systems. The usual representation of convolutional layers by the convolution kernel corresponds to the representation of a dynamical system by its impulse response. However, many analysis tools from control theory, e.g., involving linear matrix inequalities, require a state space representation. For this reason, we explicitly provide a state space representation of the Roesser type for 2-D convolutional layers with $c_\mathrm{in}r_1 + c_\mathrm{out}r_2$ states, where $c_\mathrm{in}$/$c_\mathrm{out}$ is the number of input/output channels of the layer and $r_1$/$r_2$ characterizes the width/length of the convolution kernel. This representation is shown to be minimal for $c_\mathrm{in} = c_\mathrm{out}$. We further construct state space representations for dilated, strided, and N-D convolutions.
Explainable Reinforcement Learning-based Home Energy Management Systems using Differentiable Decision Trees
Authors: Gargya Gokhale, Bert Claessens, Chris Develder
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: energy management, Management, reinforcement-learning

With the ongoing energy transition, demand-side flexibility has become an important aspect of the modern power grid for providing grid support and allowing further integration of sustainable energy sources. Besides traditional sources, the residential sector is another major and largely untapped source of flexibility, driven by the increased adoption of solar PV, home batteries, and EVs. However, unlocking this residential flexibility is challenging as it requires a control framework that can effectively manage household energy consumption, and maintain user comfort while being readily scalable across different, diverse houses. We aim to address this challenging problem and introduce a reinforcement learning-based approach using differentiable decision trees. This approach integrates the scalability of data-driven reinforcement learning with the explainability of (differentiable) decision trees. This leads to a controller that can be easily adapted across different houses and provides a simple control policy that can be explained to end-users, further improving user acceptance. As a proof-of-concept, we analyze our method using a home energy management problem, comparing its performance with commercially available rule-based baseline and standard neural network-based RL controllers. Through this preliminary study, we show that the performance of our proposed method is comparable to standard RL-based controllers, outperforming baseline controllers by ~20% in terms of daily cost savings while being straightforward to explain.
Learning Dynamical Systems Encoding Non-Linearity within Space Curvature
Authors: Bernardo Fichera, Aude Billard
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Dynamical Systems (DS) are an effective and powerful means of shaping high-level policies for robotics control. They provide robust and reactive control while ensuring the stability of the driving vector field. The increasing complexity of real-world scenarios necessitates DS with a higher degree of non-linearity, along with the ability to adapt to potential changes in environmental conditions, such as obstacles. Current learning strategies for DSs often involve a trade-off, sacrificing either stability guarantees or offline computational efficiency in order to enhance the capabilities of the learned DS. Online local adaptation to environmental changes is either not taken into consideration or treated as a separate problem. In this paper, our objective is to introduce a method that enhances the complexity of the learned DS without compromising efficiency during training or stability guarantees. Furthermore, we aim to provide a unified approach for seamlessly integrating the initially learned DS's non-linearity with any local non-linearities that may arise due to changes in the environment. We propose a geometrical approach to learn asymptotically stable non-linear DS for robotics control. Each DS is modeled as a harmonic damped oscillator on a latent manifold. By learning the manifold's Euclidean embedded representation, our approach encodes the non-linearity of the DS within the curvature of the space. Having an explicit embedded representation of the manifold allows us to showcase obstacle avoidance by directly inducing local deformations of the space. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our methodology through two scenarios: first, the 2D learning of synthetic vector fields, and second, the learning of 3D robotic end-effector motions in real-world settings.
Defining Effective Engagement For Enhancing Cancer Patients' Well-being with Mobile Digital Behavior Change Interventions
Authors: Aneta Lisowska, Szymon Wilk, Laura Locati, Mimma Rizzo, Lucia Sacchi, Silvana Quaglini, Matteo Terzaghi, Valentina Tibollo, Mor Peleg
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00

Digital Behavior Change Interventions (DBCIs) are supporting development of new health behaviors. Evaluating their effectiveness is crucial for their improvement and understanding of success factors. However, comprehensive guidance for developers, particularly in small-scale studies with ethical constraints, is limited. Building on the CAPABLE project, this study aims to define effective engagement with DBCIs for supporting cancer patients in enhancing their quality of life. We identify metrics for measuring engagement, explore the interest of both patients and clinicians in DBCIs, and propose hypotheses for assessing the impact of DBCIs in such contexts. Our findings suggest that clinician prescriptions significantly increase sustained engagement with mobile DBCIs. In addition, while one weekly engagement with a DBCI is sufficient to maintain well-being, transitioning from extrinsic to intrinsic motivation may require a higher level of engagement.
Pre-Training Auto-Generated Volumetric Shapes for 3D Medical Image Segmentation
Authors: Ryu Tadokoro, Ryosuke Yamada, Hirokatsu Kataoka
Date: 2023-06-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR Workshop 2023 6
Tasks: Image Segmentation, Medical Image Segmentation, Segmentation, Self-Supervised Learning, Semantic Segmentation

In 3D medical image segmentation, data collection and annotation costs require significant human efforts. Moreover, obtaining training data is challenging due to privacy constraints. Consequently, achieving efficient learning with limited data is an urgent 3D medical image segmentation issue. One approach to address this problem is using pre-trained models, which have been widely researched. Recently, self-supervised learning for 3D medical images has gained popularity, but the data available for such learning is also scarce, limiting the number of pre-training datasets. In recent years, formula-driven supervised learning has garnered attention. It can achieve high pre-training effects using only easily accessible synthetic data, making it a promising alternative for pre-training datasets. Inspired by this approach, we propose the Auto-generated Volumetric Shapes Database (AVS-DB) for data-scarce 3D medical image segmentation tasks. AVS-DB is automatically generated from a combination of dozens of 3D models based on polygons and shape similarity ratio variations. Our experiments show that AVS-DB pre-trained models significantly outperform models trained from scratch and achieve comparable or better performance than existing self-supervised learning methods we compared. AVS-DB can potentially enhance 3D medical image segmentation models and address limited data availability challenges.
A novel extractive multi-document text summarization system using quantum-inspired genetic algorithm: MTSQIGA
Authors: Mohammad Mojrian, Seyed Abolghasem Mirroshandel
Date: 2020-12-30 00:00:00
Proceeding: Expert Systems with Applications 2020 12
Tasks: Document Summarization, Extractive Summarization, Multi-Document Summarization, Sentence, Text Summarization

The explosive growth of textual data on the web and the problem of obtaining desired information through this enormous volume of data has led to a dramatic increase in demand for developing automatic text summarization systems. For this reason, this paper presents a novel multi-document text summarization approach, called MTSQIGA, which extracts salient sentences from source document collection to generate the summary. The proposed generic summarizer models extractive summarization as a binary optimization problem that applies a modified quantum-inspired genetic algorithm (QIGA) in its processing stage to find the best solution. Objective function of our approach plays an important role in optimizing linear combination of coverage, relevance, and redundancy factors which consists of six sentence scoring measures. To ensures the generation of a summary with predefined length limit, the presented QIGA employs a modified quantum measurement and a self-adaptive quantum rotation gate based on the quality and length of the summary. Evaluation of the proposed system was performed on DUC 2005 and 2007 benchmark datasets in terms of ROUGE standard measures. Comparison of MTSQIGA with existing state-of-the-art approaches for multi-document summarization shows superior performance of the proposed systems over other methods on both existing benchmark datasets. It also indicates promising efficiency of our proposed algorithm on applying quantum-inspired genetic algorithm to the text summarization tasks.
IUST at ClimateActivism 2024: Towards Optimal Stance Detection: A Systematic Study of Architectural Choices and Data Cleaning Techniques
Authors: Ghazaleh Mahmoudi, Sauleh Eetemadi
Date: 2024-03-22 00:00:00
Proceeding: CASE at EACL 2024 3
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Stance Detection

This work presents a systematic search of various model architecture configurations and data cleaning methods. The study evaluates the impact of data cleaning methods on the obtained results. Additionally, we demonstrate that a combination of CNN and Encoder-only models such as BERTweet outperforms FNNs. Moreover, by utilizing data augmentation, we are able to overcome the challenge of data imbalance.
Inception-YOLO: Computational cost and accuracy improvement of the YOLOv5 model based on employing modified CSP, SPPF, and inception modules
Authors: Hadi Khodaei Jooshin, Mahdi Nangir, Hadi Seyedarabi
Date: 2024-03-11 00:00:00
Proceeding: IET Image Processing 2024 3
Tasks: Medical Image Analysis, object-detection, Object Detection, Real-Time Object Detection

The demand for less complex and more accurate architectures has always been a priority since the broad usage of computer vision in everyday life, like auto-drive cars, portable applications, augmented reality systems, medical image analysis etc. There are a lot of meth- ods that have been developed to improve the accuracy and complexity of object detection, like the generations of R-CNNs and YOLOs. However, these methods are not the most efficient architectures, and there is always room to improve. In this study, the 5th ver- sion of YOLO is employed and the improved architecture, Inception-YOLO, is presented. The model significantly outperforms the SOTA YOLO family. Specifically, the improvements can be summarised as follows: impressive improvement of floating point operations (FLOPs) and number of parameters, as well as improvement in accuracy compared to the models with fewer FLOPs. All our presented approaches, like the optimized inception module, proposed structures for CSP and SPPF, and the improved loss function used in this research, work together to incrementally improve detection results, accuracy, demanded memory, and FLOPs simultaneously. For a glimpse of performance, the Inception-YOLO-S model hits 38.7% AP with 5.9M parameters and 11.5 BFLOPs and outperforms YOLOv5-S with 37.4% AP, 7.2M parameters, and 16.5 BFLOPs.
Instructing Large Language Models to Identify and Ignore Irrelevant Conditions
Authors: Zhenyu Wu, Chao Shen, Meng Jiang
Date: 2024-03-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, Mathematical Reasoning

Math word problem (MWP) solving requires generating a reasoning path based on a given problem description that often contains irrelevant conditions. Existing chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting methods elicited multi-step reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) to solve MWPs. However, they were seriously confused by the irrelevant conditions, resulting in low accuracy. In this paper, we propose a novel approach named I$^3$C that instructs LLMs to identify and ignore irrelevant conditions. It identifies a set of irrelevant condition candidates that have a weak semantic relevance with the question. Then it prompts LLMs to verify the irrelevant conditions. Lastly it instructs the LLMs with the verification on relevant and irrelevant conditions to avoid confusion and improve reasoning paths. Moreover, we propose to select (problem, reasoning paths) pairs as demonstrations to enhance I$^3$C with few-shot reasoning. We develop I$^3$C-Select that selects the most confusing problems based on the semantic relevance measurement. We conduct extensive experiments on eight MWP datasets. I$^3$C can be combined with any CoT prompting methods to improve the performance of solving MWPs. Notably, with GPT-3.5-Turbo and I$^3$C-Select, we achieve an accuracy of 96.0 and 94.1 on GSM-IC2-1K and GSM-ICM-1K, respectively, significantly outperforming the state-of-the-art few-shot prompting method Complex-CoT by +11.7 and +11.1. Our implementation is made publicly available at https://wzy6642.github.io/I3C.github.io/.
Decomposing Control Lyapunov Functions for Efficient Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Antonio Lopez, David Fridovich-Keil
Date: 2024-03-18 00:00:00
Tasks: reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Recent methods using Reinforcement Learning (RL) have proven to be successful for training intelligent agents in unknown environments. However, RL has not been applied widely in real-world robotics scenarios. This is because current state-of-the-art RL methods require large amounts of data to learn a specific task, leading to unreasonable costs when deploying the agent to collect data in real-world applications. In this paper, we build from existing work that reshapes the reward function in RL by introducing a Control Lyapunov Function (CLF), which is demonstrated to reduce the sample complexity. Still, this formulation requires knowing a CLF of the system, but due to the lack of a general method, it is often a challenge to identify a suitable CLF. Existing work can compute low-dimensional CLFs via a Hamilton-Jacobi reachability procedure. However, this class of methods becomes intractable on high-dimensional systems, a problem that we address by using a system decomposition technique to compute what we call Decomposed Control Lyapunov Functions (DCLFs). We use the computed DCLF for reward shaping, which we show improves RL performance. Through multiple examples, we demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach, where our method finds a policy to successfully land a quadcopter in less than half the amount of real-world data required by the state-of-the-art Soft-Actor Critic algorithm.