pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Gradient Boosting Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Benjamin Fuhrer, Chen Tessler, Gal Dalal
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning, Reinforcement Learning (RL)

Neural networks (NN) achieve remarkable results in various tasks, but lack key characteristics: interpretability, support for categorical features, and lightweight implementations suitable for edge devices. While ongoing efforts aim to address these challenges, Gradient Boosting Trees (GBT) inherently meet these requirements. As a result, GBTs have become the go-to method for supervised learning tasks in many real-world applications and competitions. However, their application in online learning scenarios, notably in reinforcement learning (RL), has been limited. In this work, we bridge this gap by introducing Gradient-Boosting RL (GBRL), a framework that extends the advantages of GBT to the RL domain. Using the GBRL framework, we implement various actor-critic algorithms and compare their performance with their NN counterparts. Inspired by shared backbones in NN we introduce a tree-sharing approach for policy and value functions with distinct learning rates, enhancing learning efficiency over millions of interactions. GBRL achieves competitive performance across a diverse array of tasks, excelling in domains with structured or categorical features. Additionally, we present a high-performance, GPU-accelerated implementation that integrates seamlessly with widely-used RL libraries (available at https://github.com/NVlabs/gbrl). GBRL expands the toolkit for RL practitioners, demonstrating the viability and promise of GBT within the RL paradigm, particularly in domains characterized by structured or categorical features.
GeNet: A Multimodal LLM-Based Co-Pilot for Network Topology and Configuration
Authors: Beni Ifland, Elad Duani, Rubin Krief, Miro Ohana, Aviram Zilberman, Andres Murillo, Ofir Manor, Ortal Lavi, Hikichi Kenji, Asaf Shabtai, Yuval Elovici, Rami Puzis
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Communication network engineering in enterprise environments is traditionally a complex, time-consuming, and error-prone manual process. Most research on network engineering automation has concentrated on configuration synthesis, often overlooking changes in the physical network topology. This paper introduces GeNet, a multimodal co-pilot for enterprise network engineers. GeNet is a novel framework that leverages a large language model (LLM) to streamline network design workflows. It uses visual and textual modalities to interpret and update network topologies and device configurations based on user intents. GeNet was evaluated on enterprise network scenarios adapted from Cisco certification exercises. Our results demonstrate GeNet's ability to interpret network topology images accurately, potentially reducing network engineers' efforts and accelerating network design processes in enterprise environments. Furthermore, we show the importance of precise topology understanding when handling intents that require modifications to the network's topology.
Toward accessible comics for blind and low vision readers
Authors: Christophe Rigaud, Jean-Christophe Burie, Samuel Petit
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Optical Character Recognition, Prompt Engineering, Speech Synthesis

This work explores how to fine-tune large language models using prompt engineering techniques with contextual information for generating an accurate text description of the full story, ready to be forwarded to off-the-shelve speech synthesis tools. We propose to use existing computer vision and optical character recognition techniques to build a grounded context from the comic strip image content, such as panels, characters, text, reading order and the association of bubbles and characters. Then we infer character identification and generate comic book script with context-aware panel description including character's appearance, posture, mood, dialogues etc. We believe that such enriched content description can be easily used to produce audiobook and eBook with various voices for characters, captions and playing sound effects.
Leveraging LLMs to Predict Affective States via Smartphone Sensor Features
Authors: Tianyi Zhang, Songyan Teng, Hong Jia, Simon D'Alfonso
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00

As mental health issues for young adults present a pressing public health concern, daily digital mood monitoring for early detection has become an important prospect. An active research area, digital phenotyping, involves collecting and analysing data from personal digital devices such as smartphones (usage and sensors) and wearables to infer behaviours and mental health. Whilst this data is standardly analysed using statistical and machine learning approaches, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) offers a new approach to make sense of smartphone sensing data. Despite their effectiveness across various domains, LLMs remain relatively unexplored in digital mental health, particularly in integrating mobile sensor data. Our study aims to bridge this gap by employing LLMs to predict affect outcomes based on smartphone sensing data from university students. We demonstrate the efficacy of zero-shot and few-shot embedding LLMs in inferring general wellbeing. Our findings reveal that LLMs can make promising predictions of affect measures using solely smartphone sensing data. This research sheds light on the potential of LLMs for affective state prediction, emphasizing the intricate link between smartphone behavioral patterns and affective states. To our knowledge, this is the first work to leverage LLMs for affective state prediction and digital phenotyping tasks.
DALL-M: Context-Aware Clinical Data Augmentation with LLMs
Authors: Chihcheng Hsieh, Catarina Moreira, Isabel Blanco Nobre, Sandra Costa Sousa, Chun Ouyang, Margot Brereton, Joaquim Jorge, Jacinto C. Nascimento
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Data Integration

X-ray images are vital in medical diagnostics, but their effectiveness is limited without clinical context. Radiologists often find chest X-rays insufficient for diagnosing underlying diseases, necessitating the integration of structured clinical features with radiology reports. To address this, we introduce DALL-M, a novel framework that enhances clinical datasets by generating contextual synthetic data. DALL-M augments structured patient data, including vital signs (e.g., heart rate, oxygen saturation), radiology findings (e.g., lesion presence), and demographic factors. It integrates this tabular data with contextual knowledge extracted from radiology reports and domain-specific resources (e.g., Radiopaedia, Wikipedia), ensuring clinical consistency and reliability. DALL-M follows a three-phase process: (i) clinical context storage, (ii) expert query generation, and (iii) context-aware feature augmentation. Using large language models (LLMs), it generates both contextual synthetic values for existing clinical features and entirely new, clinically relevant features. Applied to 799 cases from the MIMIC-IV dataset, DALL-M expanded the original 9 clinical features to 91. Empirical validation with machine learning models (including Decision Trees, Random Forests, XGBoost, and TabNET) demonstrated a 16.5% improvement in F1 score and a 25% increase in Precision and Recall. DALL-M bridges an important gap in clinical data augmentation by preserving data integrity while enhancing predictive modeling in healthcare. Our results show that integrating LLM-generated synthetic features significantly improves model performance, making DALL-M a scalable and practical approach for AI-driven medical diagnostics.
stEnTrans: Transformer-based deep learning for spatial transcriptomics enhancement
Authors: Shuailin Xue, Fangfang Zhu, Changmiao Wang, Wenwen Min
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning, Self-Supervised Learning

The spatial location of cells within tissues and organs is crucial for the manifestation of their specific functions.Spatial transcriptomics technology enables comprehensive measurement of the gene expression patterns in tissues while retaining spatial information. However, current popular spatial transcriptomics techniques either have shallow sequencing depth or low resolution. We present stEnTrans, a deep learning method based on Transformer architecture that provides comprehensive predictions for gene expression in unmeasured areas or unexpectedly lost areas and enhances gene expression in original and inputed spots. Utilizing a self-supervised learning approach, stEnTrans establishes proxy tasks on gene expression profile without requiring additional data, mining intrinsic features of the tissues as supervisory information. We evaluate stEnTrans on six datasets and the results indicate superior performance in enhancing spots resolution and predicting gene expression in unmeasured areas compared to other deep learning and traditional interpolation methods. Additionally, Our method also can help the discovery of spatial patterns in Spatial Transcriptomics and enrich to more biologically significant pathways. Our source code is available at https://github.com/shuailinxue/stEnTrans.
Speculative RAG: Enhancing Retrieval Augmented Generation through Drafting
Authors: Zilong Wang, Zifeng Wang, Long Le, Huaixiu Steven Zheng, Swaroop Mishra, Vincent Perot, Yuwei Zhang, Anush Mattapalli, Ankur Taly, Jingbo Shang, Chen-Yu Lee, Tomas Pfister
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: ARC, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation, TriviaQA

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) combines the generative abilities of large language models (LLMs) with external knowledge sources to provide more accurate and up-to-date responses. Recent RAG advancements focus on improving retrieval outcomes through iterative LLM refinement or self-critique capabilities acquired through additional instruction tuning of LLMs. In this work, we introduce Speculative RAG - a framework that leverages a larger generalist LM to efficiently verify multiple RAG drafts produced in parallel by a smaller, distilled specialist LM. Each draft is generated from a distinct subset of retrieved documents, offering diverse perspectives on the evidence while reducing input token counts per draft. This approach enhances comprehension of each subset and mitigates potential position bias over long context. Our method accelerates RAG by delegating drafting to the smaller specialist LM, with the larger generalist LM performing a single verification pass over the drafts. Extensive experiments demonstrate that Speculative RAG achieves state-of-the-art performance with reduced latency on TriviaQA, MuSiQue, PubHealth, and ARC-Challenge benchmarks. It notably enhances accuracy by up to 12.97% while reducing latency by 51% compared to conventional RAG systems on PubHealth.
Multimodal contrastive learning for spatial gene expression prediction using histology images
Authors: Wenwen Min, Zhiceng Shi, Jun Zhang, Jun Wan, Changmiao Wang
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, whole slide images

In recent years, the advent of spatial transcriptomics (ST) technology has unlocked unprecedented opportunities for delving into the complexities of gene expression patterns within intricate biological systems. Despite its transformative potential, the prohibitive cost of ST technology remains a significant barrier to its widespread adoption in large-scale studies. An alternative, more cost-effective strategy involves employing artificial intelligence to predict gene expression levels using readily accessible whole-slide images (WSIs) stained with Hematoxylin and Eosin (H\&E). However, existing methods have yet to fully capitalize on multimodal information provided by H&E images and ST data with spatial location. In this paper, we propose \textbf{mclSTExp}, a multimodal contrastive learning with Transformer and Densenet-121 encoder for Spatial Transcriptomics Expression prediction. We conceptualize each spot as a "word", integrating its intrinsic features with spatial context through the self-attention mechanism of a Transformer encoder. This integration is further enriched by incorporating image features via contrastive learning, thereby enhancing the predictive capability of our model. Our extensive evaluation of \textbf{mclSTExp} on two breast cancer datasets and a skin squamous cell carcinoma dataset demonstrates its superior performance in predicting spatial gene expression. Moreover, mclSTExp has shown promise in interpreting cancer-specific overexpressed genes, elucidating immune-related genes, and identifying specialized spatial domains annotated by pathologists. Our source code is available at https://github.com/shizhiceng/mclSTExp.
Towards stable training of parallel continual learning
Authors: Li Yuepan, Fan Lyu, Yuyang Li, Wei Feng, Guangcan Liu, Fanhua Shang
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Autonomous Vehicles, Continual Learning

Parallel Continual Learning (PCL) tasks investigate the training methods for continual learning with multi-source input, where data from different tasks are learned as they arrive. PCL offers high training efficiency and is well-suited for complex multi-source data systems, such as autonomous vehicles equipped with multiple sensors. However, at any time, multiple tasks need to be trained simultaneously, leading to severe training instability in PCL. This instability manifests during both forward and backward propagation, where features are entangled and gradients are conflict. This paper introduces Stable Parallel Continual Learning (SPCL), a novel approach that enhances the training stability of PCL for both forward and backward propagation. For the forward propagation, we apply Doubly-block Toeplit (DBT) Matrix based orthogonality constraints to network parameters to ensure stable and consistent propagation. For the backward propagation, we employ orthogonal decomposition for gradient management stabilizes backpropagation and mitigates gradient conflicts across tasks. By optimizing gradients by ensuring orthogonality and minimizing the condition number, SPCL effectively stabilizing the gradient descent in complex optimization tasks. Experimental results demonstrate that SPCL outperforms state-of-the-art methjods and achieve better training stability.
Chromosomal Structural Abnormality Diagnosis by Homologous Similarity
Authors: Juren Li, Fanzhe Fu, Ran Wei, Yifei Sun, Zeyu Lai, Ning Song, Xin Chen, Yang Yang
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00

Pathogenic chromosome abnormalities are very common among the general population. While numerical chromosome abnormalities can be quickly and precisely detected, structural chromosome abnormalities are far more complex and typically require considerable efforts by human experts for identification. This paper focuses on investigating the modeling of chromosome features and the identification of chromosomes with structural abnormalities. Most existing data-driven methods concentrate on a single chromosome and consider each chromosome independently, overlooking the crucial aspect of homologous chromosomes. In normal cases, homologous chromosomes share identical structures, with the exception that one of them is abnormal. Therefore, we propose an adaptive method to align homologous chromosomes and diagnose structural abnormalities through homologous similarity. Inspired by the process of human expert diagnosis, we incorporate information from multiple pairs of homologous chromosomes simultaneously, aiming to reduce noise disturbance and improve prediction performance. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness of our model compared to baselines.
SoupLM: Model Integration in Large Language and Multi-Modal Models
Authors: Yue Bai, Zichen Zhang, Jiasen Lu, Yun Fu
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Chatbot

Training large language models (LLMs) and multimodal LLMs necessitates significant computing resources, and existing publicly available LLMs are typically pre-trained on diverse, privately curated datasets spanning various tasks. For instance, LLaMA, Vicuna, and LLaVA are three LLM variants trained with LLaMA base models using very different training recipes, tasks, and data modalities. The training cost and complexity for such LLM variants grow rapidly. In this study, we propose to use a soup strategy to assemble these LLM variants into a single well-generalized multimodal LLM (SoupLM) in a cost-efficient manner. Assembling these LLM variants efficiently brings knowledge and specialities trained from different domains and data modalities into an integrated one (e.g., chatbot speciality from user-shared conversations for Vicuna, and visual capacity from vision-language data for LLaVA), therefore, to avoid computing costs of repetitive training on several different domains. We propose series of soup strategies to systematically benchmark performance gains across various configurations, and probe the soup behavior across base models in the interpolation space.
A Text-to-Game Engine for UGC-Based Role-Playing Games
Authors: Lei Zhang, Xuezheng Peng, Shuyi Yang, Feiyang Wang
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00

The transition from professionally generated content (PGC) to user-generated content (UGC) has reshaped various media formats, encompassing formats such as text and video. With rapid advancements in generative AI, a similar transformation is set to redefine the gaming industry, particularly within the domain of role-playing games (RPGs). This paper introduces a novel framework for a text-to-game engine that leverages foundation models to transform simple textual inputs into intricate, multi-modal RPG experiences. The engine dynamically generates game narratives, integrating text, visuals, and mechanics, while adapting characters, environments, and gameplay in realtime based on player interactions. To evaluate and demonstrate the feasibility and versatility of this framework, we developed the 'Zagii' game engine. Zagii has successfully powered hundreds of RPG games across diverse genres and facilitated tens of thousands of online gameplay sessions, showcasing its scalability and adaptability. These results highlight the framework's effectiveness and its potential to foster a more open and democratized approach to game development. Our work underscores the transformative role of generative AI in reshaping the gaming lifecycle and advancing the boundaries of interactive entertainment.
Dynamic Co-Optimization Compiler: Leveraging Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Enhanced DNN Accelerator Performance
Authors: Arya Fayyazi, Mehdi Kamal, Massoud Pedram
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning

This paper introduces a novel Dynamic Co-Optimization Compiler (DCOC), which employs an adaptive Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning (MARL) framework to enhance the efficiency of mapping machine learning (ML) models, particularly Deep Neural Networks (DNNs), onto diverse hardware platforms. DCOC incorporates three specialized actor-critic agents within MARL, each dedicated to different optimization facets: one for hardware and two for software. This cooperative strategy results in an integrated hardware/software co-optimization approach, improving the precision and speed of DNN deployments. By focusing on high-confidence configurations, DCOC effectively reduces the search space, achieving remarkable performance over existing methods. Our results demonstrate that DCOC enhances throughput by up to 37.95% while reducing optimization time by up to 42.2% across various DNN models, outperforming current state-of-the-art frameworks.
fairBERTs: Erasing Sensitive Information Through Semantic and Fairness-aware Perturbations
Authors: Jinfeng Li, Yuefeng Chen, Xiangyu Liu, Longtao Huang, Rong Zhang, Hui Xue
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Generative Adversarial Network

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have revolutionized both the natural language processing research and applications. However, stereotypical biases (e.g., gender and racial discrimination) encoded in PLMs have raised negative ethical implications for PLMs, which critically limits their broader applications. To address the aforementioned unfairness issues, we present fairBERTs, a general framework for learning fair fine-tuned BERT series models by erasing the protected sensitive information via semantic and fairness-aware perturbations generated by a generative adversarial network. Through extensive qualitative and quantitative experiments on two real-world tasks, we demonstrate the great superiority of fairBERTs in mitigating unfairness while maintaining the model utility. We also verify the feasibility of transferring adversarial components in fairBERTs to other conventionally trained BERT-like models for yielding fairness improvements. Our findings may shed light on further research on building fairer fine-tuned PLMs.
CoGS: Causality Constrained Counterfactual Explanations using goal-directed ASP
Authors: Sopam Dasgupta, Joaquín Arias, Elmer Salazar, Gopal Gupta
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Attribute, counterfactual, Decision Making

Machine learning models are increasingly used in areas such as loan approvals and hiring, yet they often function as black boxes, obscuring their decision-making processes. Transparency is crucial, and individuals need explanations to understand decisions, especially for the ones not desired by the user. Ethical and legal considerations require informing individuals of changes in input attribute values (features) that could lead to a desired outcome for the user. Our work aims to generate counterfactual explanations by considering causal dependencies between features. We present the CoGS (Counterfactual Generation with s(CASP)) framework that utilizes the goal-directed Answer Set Programming system s(CASP) to generate counterfactuals from rule-based machine learning models, specifically the FOLD-SE algorithm. CoGS computes realistic and causally consistent changes to attribute values taking causal dependencies between them into account. It finds a path from an undesired outcome to a desired one using counterfactuals. We present details of the CoGS framework along with its evaluation.
Foundation Model Engineering: Engineering Foundation Models Just as Engineering Software
Authors: Dezhi Ran, Mengzhou Wu, Wei Yang, Tao Xie
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Management

By treating data and models as the source code, Foundation Models (FMs) become a new type of software. Mirroring the concept of software crisis, the increasing complexity of FMs making FM crisis a tangible concern in the coming decade, appealing for new theories and methodologies from the field of software engineering. In this paper, we outline our vision of introducing Foundation Model (FM) engineering, a strategic response to the anticipated FM crisis with principled engineering methodologies. FM engineering aims to mitigate potential issues in FM development and application through the introduction of declarative, automated, and unified programming interfaces for both data and model management, reducing the complexities involved in working with FMs by providing a more structured and intuitive process for developers. Through the establishment of FM engineering, we aim to provide a robust, automated, and extensible framework that addresses the imminent challenges, and discovering new research opportunities for the software engineering field.