pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Descriptive Caption Enhancement with Visual Specialists for Multimodal Perception
Authors: Yanpeng Sun, Jing Hao, Ke Zhu, Jiang-Jiang Liu, Yuxiang Zhao, Xiaofan Li, Gang Zhang, Zechao Li, Jingdong Wang
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Descriptive, Human-Object Interaction Detection, Image Captioning, Object

Training Large Multimodality Models (LMMs) relies on descriptive image caption that connects image and language. Existing methods either distill the caption from the LMM models or construct the captions from the internet images or by human. We propose to leverage off-the-shelf visual specialists, which were trained from annotated images initially not for image captioning, for enhancing the image caption. Our approach, named DCE, explores object low-level and fine-grained attributes (e.g., depth, emotion and fine-grained categories) and object relations (e.g., relative location and human-object-interaction (HOI)), and combine the attributes into the descriptive caption. Experiments demonstrate that such visual specialists are able to improve the performance for visual understanding tasks as well as reasoning that benefits from more accurate visual understanding. We will release the source code and the pipeline so that other visual specialists are easily combined into the pipeline. The complete source code of DCE pipeline and datasets will be available at \url{https://github.com/syp2ysy/DCE}.
ViTmiX: Vision Transformer Explainability Augmented by Mixed Visualization Methods
Authors: Eduard Hogea, Darian M. Onchis, Ana Coporan, Adina Magda Florea, Codruta Istin
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Semantic Segmentation

Recent advancements in Vision Transformers (ViT) have demonstrated exceptional results in various visual recognition tasks, owing to their ability to capture long-range dependencies in images through self-attention mechanisms. However, the complex nature of ViT models requires robust explainability methods to unveil their decision-making processes. Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) plays a crucial role in improving model transparency and trustworthiness by providing insights into model predictions. Current approaches to ViT explainability, based on visualization techniques such as Layer-wise Relevance Propagation (LRP) and gradient-based methods, have shown promising but sometimes limited results. In this study, we explore a hybrid approach that mixes multiple explainability techniques to overcome these limitations and enhance the interpretability of ViT models. Our experiments reveal that this hybrid approach significantly improves the interpretability of ViT models compared to individual methods. We also introduce modifications to existing techniques, such as using geometric mean for mixing, which demonstrates notable results in object segmentation tasks. To quantify the explainability gain, we introduced a novel post-hoc explainability measure by applying the Pigeonhole principle. These findings underscore the importance of refining and optimizing explainability methods for ViT models, paving the way to reliable XAI-based segmentations.
Transversal PACS Browser API: Addressing Interoperability Challenges in Medical Imaging Systems
Authors: Diogo Lameira, Filipa Ferraz
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate

Advances in imaging technologies have revolutionised the medical imaging and healthcare sectors, leading to the widespread adoption of PACS for the storage, retrieval, and communication of medical images. Although these systems have improved operational efficiency, significant challenges remain in effectively retrieving DICOM images, which are essential for diagnosis and overall patient care. Moreover, issues such as fragmented systems, interoperability barriers, and complex user interfaces can often prevent healthcare professionals from efficiently accessing medical images. Addressing these challenges, the Transversal PACS Browser API is a robust and user-friendly solution designed to enhance the process of querying and retrieving DICOM images. It offers advanced filtering capabilities through a variety of filter options as well as a custom field search, that allows users to easily navigate through large medical image collections with ease. Additionally, the application provides a unified interface for querying and retrieving from multiple PACS stations, addressing the challenges of fragmentation and complexity associated with accessing medical images. Other key features include the ability to pre-view images directly within the application. All of this contributes to the transversal nature of the API, serving not only healthcare providers, but anyone who relies on efficient access to these resources. To validate the performance and usability of the application, comprehensive testing was carried out with stakeholders of the field, the results of which showed general satisfaction, highlighting the API's clean design, ease of use, and effective search capabilities of the API, as well as the usefulness of previewing images within the application.
Distilled Pooling Transformer Encoder for Efficient Realistic Image Dehazing
Authors: Le-Anh Tran, Dong-Chul Park
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: Generative Adversarial Network, Image Dehazing, Image Restoration

This paper proposes a lightweight neural network designed for realistic image dehazing, utilizing a Distilled Pooling Transformer Encoder, named DPTE-Net. Recently, while vision transformers (ViTs) have achieved great success in various vision tasks, their self-attention (SA) module's complexity scales quadratically with image resolution, hindering their applicability on resource-constrained devices. To overcome this, the proposed DPTE-Net substitutes traditional SA modules with efficient pooling mechanisms, significantly reducing computational demands while preserving ViTs' learning capabilities. To further enhance semantic feature learning, a distillation-based training process is implemented which transfers rich knowledge from a larger teacher network to DPTE-Net. Additionally, DPTE-Net is trained within a generative adversarial network (GAN) framework, leveraging the strong generalization of GAN in image restoration, and employs a transmission-aware loss function to dynamically adapt to varying haze densities. Experimental results on various benchmark datasets have shown that the proposed DPTE-Net can achieve competitive dehazing performance when compared to state-of-the-art methods while maintaining low computational complexity, making it a promising solution for resource-limited applications. The code of this work is available at https://github.com/tranleanh/dpte-net.
Improving Generalization Performance of YOLOv8 for Camera Trap Object Detection
Authors: Aroj Subedi
Date: 2024-12-18 00:00:00
Tasks: object-detection, Object Detection

Camera traps have become integral tools in wildlife conservation, providing non-intrusive means to monitor and study wildlife in their natural habitats. The utilization of object detection algorithms to automate species identification from Camera Trap images is of huge importance for research and conservation purposes. However, the generalization issue, where the trained model is unable to apply its learnings to a never-before-seen dataset, is prevalent. This thesis explores the enhancements made to the YOLOv8 object detection algorithm to address the problem of generalization. The study delves into the limitations of the baseline YOLOv8 model, emphasizing its struggles with generalization in real-world environments. To overcome these limitations, enhancements are proposed, including the incorporation of a Global Attention Mechanism (GAM) module, modified multi-scale feature fusion, and Wise Intersection over Union (WIoUv3) as a bounding box regression loss function. A thorough evaluation and ablation experiments reveal the improved model's ability to suppress the background noise, focus on object properties, and exhibit robust generalization in novel environments. The proposed enhancements not only address the challenges inherent in camera trap datasets but also pave the way for broader applicability in real-world conservation scenarios, ultimately aiding in the effective management of wildlife populations and habitats.
Data for Mathematical Copilots: Better Ways of Presenting Proofs for Machine Learning
Authors: Simon Frieder, Jonas Bayer, Katherine M. Collins, Julius Berner, Jacob Loader, András Juhász, Fabian Ruehle, Sean Welleck, Gabriel Poesia, Ryan-Rhys Griffiths, Adrian Weller, Anirudh Goyal, Thomas Lukasiewicz, Timothy Gowers
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

The suite of datasets commonly used to train and evaluate the mathematical capabilities of AI-based mathematical copilots (primarily large language models) exhibit several shortcomings. These limitations include a restricted scope of mathematical complexity, typically not exceeding lower undergraduate-level mathematics, binary rating protocols and other issues, which makes comprehensive proof-based evaluation suites difficult. We systematically explore these limitations and contend that enhancing the capabilities of large language models, or any forthcoming advancements in AI-based mathematical assistants (copilots or "thought partners"), necessitates a paradigm shift in the design of mathematical datasets and the evaluation criteria of mathematical ability: It is necessary to move away from result-based datasets (theorem statement to theorem proof) and convert the rich facets of mathematical research practice to data LLMs can train on. Examples of these are mathematical workflows (sequences of atomic, potentially subfield-dependent tasks that are often performed when creating new mathematics), which are an important part of the proof-discovery process. Additionally, we advocate for mathematical dataset developers to consider the concept of "motivated proof", introduced by G. P\'olya in 1949, which can serve as a blueprint for datasets that offer a better proof learning signal, alleviating some of the mentioned limitations. Lastly, we introduce math datasheets for datasets, extending the general, dataset-agnostic variants of datasheets: We provide a questionnaire designed specifically for math datasets that we urge dataset creators to include with their datasets. This will make creators aware of potential limitations of their datasets while at the same time making it easy for readers to assess it from the point of view of training and evaluating mathematical copilots.
STRAP: Robot Sub-Trajectory Retrieval for Augmented Policy Learning
Authors: Marius Memmel, Jacob Berg, Bingqing Chen, Abhishek Gupta, Jonathan Francis
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Dynamic Time Warping, Multi-Task Learning, Retrieval

Robot learning is witnessing a significant increase in the size, diversity, and complexity of pre-collected datasets, mirroring trends in domains such as natural language processing and computer vision. Many robot learning methods treat such datasets as multi-task expert data and learn a multi-task, generalist policy by training broadly across them. Notably, while these generalist policies can improve the average performance across many tasks, the performance of generalist policies on any one task is often suboptimal due to negative transfer between partitions of the data, compared to task-specific specialist policies. In this work, we argue for the paradigm of training policies during deployment given the scenarios they encounter: rather than deploying pre-trained policies to unseen problems in a zero-shot manner, we non-parametrically retrieve and train models directly on relevant data at test time. Furthermore, we show that many robotics tasks share considerable amounts of low-level behaviors and that retrieval at the "sub"-trajectory granularity enables significantly improved data utilization, generalization, and robustness in adapting policies to novel problems. In contrast, existing full-trajectory retrieval methods tend to underutilize the data and miss out on shared cross-task content. This work proposes STRAP, a technique for leveraging pre-trained vision foundation models and dynamic time warping to retrieve sub-sequences of trajectories from large training corpora in a robust fashion. STRAP outperforms both prior retrieval algorithms and multi-task learning methods in simulated and real experiments, showing the ability to scale to much larger offline datasets in the real world as well as the ability to learn robust control policies with just a handful of real-world demonstrations.
HPC-Coder-V2: Studying Code LLMs Across Low-Resource Parallel Languages
Authors: Aman Chaturvedi, Daniel Nichols, Siddharth Singh, Abhinav Bhatele
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Generation, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large Language Model (LLM) based coding tools have been tremendously successful as software development assistants, yet they are often designed for general purpose programming tasks and perform poorly for more specialized domains such as high performance computing. Creating specialized models and tools for these domains is crucial towards gaining the benefits of LLMs in areas such as HPC. While previous work has explored HPC-specific models, LLMs still struggle to generate parallel code and it is not at all clear what hurdles are still holding back these LLMs and what must be done to overcome them. In this work, we conduct an in-depth study along the many axes of fine-tuning a specialized HPC LLM in order to better understand the challenges. Based on our findings we fine-tune and evaluate a specialized HPC LLM that is shown to be the best performing open-source code LLM for parallel code generation to date.
Rethinking Uncertainty Estimation in Natural Language Generation
Authors: Lukas Aichberger, Kajetan Schweighofer, Sepp Hochreiter
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, Text Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, driving the need to evaluate the trustworthiness of their generated text. To this end, reliable uncertainty estimation is essential. Since current LLMs generate text autoregressively through a stochastic process, the same prompt can lead to varying outputs. Consequently, leading uncertainty estimation methods generate and analyze multiple output sequences to determine the LLM's uncertainty. However, generating output sequences is computationally expensive, making these methods impractical at scale. In this work, we inspect the theoretical foundations of the leading methods and explore new directions to enhance their computational efficiency. Building on the framework of proper scoring rules, we find that the negative log-likelihood of the most likely output sequence constitutes a theoretically grounded uncertainty measure. To approximate this alternative measure, we propose G-NLL, which has the advantage of being obtained using only a single output sequence generated by greedy decoding. This makes uncertainty estimation more efficient and straightforward, while preserving theoretical rigor. Empirical results demonstrate that G-NLL achieves state-of-the-art performance across various LLMs and tasks. Our work lays the foundation for efficient and reliable uncertainty estimation in natural language generation, challenging the necessity of more computationally involved methods currently leading the field.
Tests for model misspecification in simulation-based inference: from local distortions to global model checks
Authors: Noemi Anau Montel, James Alvey, Christoph Weniger
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, model, parameter estimation, valid

Model misspecification analysis strategies, such as anomaly detection, model validation, and model comparison are a key component of scientific model development. Over the last few years, there has been a rapid rise in the use of simulation-based inference (SBI) techniques for Bayesian parameter estimation, applied to increasingly complex forward models. To move towards fully simulation-based analysis pipelines, however, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive simulation-based framework for model misspecification analysis. In this work, we provide a solid and flexible foundation for a wide range of model discrepancy analysis tasks, using distortion-driven model misspecification tests. From a theoretical perspective, we introduce the statistical framework built around performing many hypothesis tests for distortions of the simulation model. We also make explicit analytic connections to classical techniques: anomaly detection, model validation, and goodness-of-fit residual analysis. Furthermore, we introduce an efficient self-calibrating training algorithm that is useful for practitioners. We demonstrate the performance of the framework in multiple scenarios, making the connection to classical results where they are valid. Finally, we show how to conduct such a distortion-driven model misspecification test for real gravitational wave data, specifically on the event GW150914.
DroughtSet: Understanding Drought Through Spatial-Temporal Learning
Authors: Xuwei Tan, Qian Zhao, Yanlan Liu, Xueru Zhang
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series Forecasting

Drought is one of the most destructive and expensive natural disasters, severely impacting natural resources and risks by depleting water resources and diminishing agricultural yields. Under climate change, accurately predicting drought is critical for mitigating drought-induced risks. However, the intricate interplay among the physical and biological drivers that regulate droughts limits the predictability and understanding of drought, particularly at a subseasonal to seasonal (S2S) time scale. While deep learning has been demonstrated with potential in addressing climate forecasting challenges, its application to drought prediction has received relatively less attention. In this work, we propose a new dataset, DroughtSet, which integrates relevant predictive features and three drought indices from multiple remote sensing and reanalysis datasets across the contiguous United States (CONUS). DroughtSet specifically provides the machine learning community with a new real-world dataset to benchmark drought prediction models and more generally, time-series forecasting methods. Furthermore, we propose a spatial-temporal model SPDrought to predict and interpret S2S droughts. Our model learns from the spatial and temporal information of physical and biological features to predict three types of droughts simultaneously. Multiple strategies are employed to quantify the importance of physical and biological features for drought prediction. Our results provide insights for researchers to better understand the predictability and sensitivity of drought to biological and physical conditions. We aim to contribute to the climate field by proposing a new tool to predict and understand the occurrence of droughts and provide the AI community with a new benchmark to study deep learning applications in climate science.
DisCo: Graph-Based Disentangled Contrastive Learning for Cold-Start Cross-Domain Recommendation
Authors: Hourun Li, Yifan Wang, Zhiping Xiao, Jia Yang, Changling Zhou, Ming Zhang, Wei Ju
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Recommendation Systems

Recommender systems are widely used in various real-world applications, but they often encounter the persistent challenge of the user cold-start problem. Cross-domain recommendation (CDR), which leverages user interactions from one domain to improve prediction performance in another, has emerged as a promising solution. However, users with similar preferences in the source domain may exhibit different interests in the target domain. Therefore, directly transferring embeddings may introduce irrelevant source-domain collaborative information. In this paper, we propose a novel graph-based disentangled contrastive learning framework to capture fine-grained user intent and filter out irrelevant collaborative information, thereby avoiding negative transfer. Specifically, for each domain, we use a multi-channel graph encoder to capture diverse user intents. We then construct the affinity graph in the embedding space and perform multi-step random walks to capture high-order user similarity relationships. Treating one domain as the target, we propose a disentangled intent-wise contrastive learning approach, guided by user similarity, to refine the bridging of user intents across domains. Extensive experiments on four benchmark CDR datasets demonstrate that DisCo consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art baselines, thereby validating the effectiveness of both DisCo and its components.
Knowledge Injection via Prompt Distillation
Authors: Kalle Kujanpää, Harri Valpola, Alexander Ilin
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: RAG, Retrieval-augmented Generation

In many practical applications, large language models (LLMs) need to incorporate new knowledge not present in their pre-training data. The primary methods for this are fine-tuning and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). Although RAG has emerged as the industry standard for knowledge injection, fine-tuning has not yet achieved comparable success. In this paper, we propose a new fine-tuning technique for learning new knowledge and show that it can reach the performance of RAG. The proposed method is based on the self-distillation approach, which we call prompt distillation. First, we generate question-answer pairs about the new knowledge. Then, we fine-tune a student model on the question-answer pairs to imitate the output distributions of a teacher model, which additionally receives the new knowledge in its prompt. The student model is identical to the teacher, except it is equipped with a LoRA adapter. This training procedure facilitates distilling the new knowledge from the teacher's prompt into the student's weights.
From Point to probabilistic gradient boosting for claim frequency and severity prediction
Authors: Dominik Chevalier, Marie-Pier Côté
Date: 2024-12-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency, severity prediction

Gradient boosting for decision tree algorithms are increasingly used in actuarial applications as they show superior predictive performance over traditional generalised linear models. Many enhancements to the first gradient boosting machine algorithm exist. We present in a unified notation, and contrast, all the existing point and probabilistic gradient boosting for decision tree algorithms: GBM, XGBoost, DART, LightGBM, CatBoost, EGBM, PGBM, XGBoostLSS, cyclic GBM, and NGBoost. In this comprehensive numerical study, we compare their performance on five publicly available datasets for claim frequency and severity, of various sizes and comprising different numbers of (high cardinality) categorical variables. We explain how varying exposure-to-risk can be handled with boosting in frequency models. We compare the algorithms on the basis of computational efficiency, predictive performance, and model adequacy. LightGBM and XGBoostLSS win in terms of computational efficiency. CatBoost sometimes improves predictive performance, especially in the presence of high cardinality categorical variables, common in actuarial science. The fully interpretable EGBM achieves competitive predictive performance compared to the black box algorithms considered. We find that there is no trade-off between model adequacy and predictive accuracy: both are achievable simultaneously.