pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
ISLES 2024: The first longitudinal multimodal multi-center real-world dataset in (sub-)acute stroke
Authors: Evamaria O. Riedel, Ezequiel de la Rosa, The Anh Baran, Moritz Hernandez Petzsche, Hakim Baazaoui, Kaiyuan Yang, David Robben, Joaquin Oscar Seia, Roland Wiest, Mauricio Reyes, Ruisheng Su, Claus Zimmer, Tobias Boeckh-Behrens, Maria Berndt, Bjoern Menze, Benedikt Wiestler, Susanne Wegener, Jan S. Kirschke
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Ischemic Stroke Lesion Segmentation, Lesion Segmentation, Prognosis

Stroke remains a leading cause of global morbidity and mortality, placing a heavy socioeconomic burden. Over the past decade, advances in endovascular reperfusion therapy and the use of CT and MRI imaging for treatment guidance have significantly improved patient outcomes and are now standard in clinical practice. To develop machine learning algorithms that can extract meaningful and reproducible models of brain function for both clinical and research purposes from stroke images - particularly for lesion identification, brain health quantification, and prognosis - large, diverse, and well-annotated public datasets are essential. While only a few datasets with (sub-)acute stroke data were previously available, several large, high-quality datasets have recently been made publicly accessible. However, these existing datasets include only MRI data. In contrast, our dataset is the first to offer comprehensive longitudinal stroke data, including acute CT imaging with angiography and perfusion, follow-up MRI at 2-9 days, as well as acute and longitudinal clinical data up to a three-month outcome. The dataset includes a training dataset of n = 150 and a test dataset of n = 100 scans. Training data is publicly available, while test data will be used exclusively for model validation. We are making this dataset available as part of the 2024 edition of the Ischemic Stroke Lesion Segmentation (ISLES) challenge (https://www.isles-challenge.org/), which continuously aims to establish benchmark methods for acute and sub-acute ischemic stroke lesion segmentation, aiding in creating open stroke imaging datasets and evaluating cutting-edge image processing algorithms.
Target-Oriented Object Grasping via Multimodal Human Guidance
Authors: Pengwei Xie, Siang Chen, Dingchang Hu, Yixiang Dai, Kaiqin Yang, Guijin Wang
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Motion Planning, Object, Robotic Grasping

In the context of human-robot interaction and collaboration scenarios, robotic grasping still encounters numerous challenges. Traditional grasp detection methods generally analyze the entire scene to predict grasps, leading to redundancy and inefficiency. In this work, we reconsider 6-DoF grasp detection from a target-referenced perspective and propose a Target-Oriented Grasp Network (TOGNet). TOGNet specifically targets local, object-agnostic region patches to predict grasps more efficiently. It integrates seamlessly with multimodal human guidance, including language instructions, pointing gestures, and interactive clicks. Thus our system comprises two primary functional modules: a guidance module that identifies the target object in 3D space and TOGNet, which detects region-focal 6-DoF grasps around the target, facilitating subsequent motion planning. Through 50 target-grasping simulation experiments in cluttered scenes, our system achieves a success rate improvement of about 13.7%. In real-world experiments, we demonstrate that our method excels in various target-oriented grasping scenarios.
Binocular Model: A deep learning solution for online melt pool temperature analysis using dual-wavelength Imaging Pyrometry
Authors: Javid Akhavan, Chaitanya Krishna Vallabh, Xiayun Zhao, Souran Manoochehri
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Deep Learning

In metal Additive Manufacturing (AM), monitoring the temperature of the Melt Pool (MP) is crucial for ensuring part quality, process stability, defect prevention, and overall process optimization. Traditional methods, are slow to converge and require extensive manual effort to translate data into actionable insights, rendering them impractical for real-time monitoring and control. To address this challenge, we propose an Artificial Intelligence (AI)-based solution aimed at reducing manual data processing reliance and improving the efficiency of transitioning from data to insight. In our study, we utilize a dataset comprising dual-wavelength real-time process monitoring data and corresponding temperature maps. We introduce a deep learning model called the "Binocular model," which exploits dual input observations to perform a precise analysis of MP temperature in Laser Powder Bed Fusion (L-PBF). Through advanced deep learning techniques, we seamlessly convert raw data into temperature maps, significantly streamlining the process and enabling batch processing at a rate of up to 750 frames per second, approximately 1000 times faster than conventional methods. Our Binocular model achieves high accuracy in temperature estimation, evidenced by a 0.95 R-squared score, while simultaneously enhancing processing efficiency by a factor of $\sim1000x$ times. This model directly addresses the challenge of real-time MP temperature monitoring and offers insights into the encountered constraints and the benefits of our Deep Learning-based approach. By combining efficiency and precision, our work contributes to the advancement of temperature monitoring in L-PBF, thus driving progress in the field of metal AM.
GSLoc: Efficient Camera Pose Refinement via 3D Gaussian Splatting
Authors: Changkun Liu, Shuai Chen, Yash Bhalgat, Siyan Hu, Ming Cheng, ZiRui Wang, Victor Adrian Prisacariu, Tristan Braud
Date: 2024-08-20 00:00:00
Tasks: 3DGS, NeRF, Pose Estimation, regression, Visual Localization

We leverage 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) as a scene representation and propose a novel test-time camera pose refinement framework, GSLoc. This framework enhances the localization accuracy of state-of-the-art absolute pose regression and scene coordinate regression methods. The 3DGS model renders high-quality synthetic images and depth maps to facilitate the establishment of 2D-3D correspondences. GSLoc obviates the need for training feature extractors or descriptors by operating directly on RGB images, utilizing the 3D foundation model, MASt3R, for precise 2D matching. To improve the robustness of our model in challenging outdoor environments, we incorporate an exposure-adaptive module within the 3DGS framework. Consequently, GSLoc enables efficient one-shot pose refinement given a single RGB query and a coarse initial pose estimation. Our proposed approach surpasses leading NeRF-based optimization methods in both accuracy and runtime across indoor and outdoor visual localization benchmarks, achieving new state-of-the-art accuracy on two indoor datasets.
Scaling Cross-Embodied Learning: One Policy for Manipulation, Navigation, Locomotion and Aviation
Authors: Ria Doshi, Homer Walke, Oier Mees, Sudeep Dasari, Sergey Levine
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00

Modern machine learning systems rely on large datasets to attain broad generalization, and this often poses a challenge in robot learning, where each robotic platform and task might have only a small dataset. By training a single policy across many different kinds of robots, a robot learning method can leverage much broader and more diverse datasets, which in turn can lead to better generalization and robustness. However, training a single policy on multi-robot data is challenging because robots can have widely varying sensors, actuators, and control frequencies. We propose CrossFormer, a scalable and flexible transformer-based policy that can consume data from any embodiment. We train CrossFormer on the largest and most diverse dataset to date, 900K trajectories across 20 different robot embodiments. We demonstrate that the same network weights can control vastly different robots, including single and dual arm manipulation systems, wheeled robots, quadcopters, and quadrupeds. Unlike prior work, our model does not require manual alignment of the observation or action spaces. Extensive experiments in the real world show that our method matches the performance of specialist policies tailored for each embodiment, while also significantly outperforming the prior state of the art in cross-embodiment learning.
Optical ISAC: Fundamental Performance Limits and Transceiver Design
Authors: Alireza Ghazavi Khorasgani, Mahtab Mirmohseni, Ahmed Elzanaty
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Integrated sensing and communication, ISAC, valid

This paper characterizes the optimal capacity-distortion (C-D) tradeoff in an optical point-to-point system with single-input single-output (SISO) for communication and single-input multiple-output (SIMO) for sensing within an integrated sensing and communication (ISAC) framework. We consider the optimal rate-distortion (R-D) region and explore several inner (IB) and outer bounds (OB). We introduce practical, asymptotically optimal maximum a posteriori (MAP) and maximum likelihood estimators (MLE) for target distance, addressing nonlinear measurement-to-state relationships and non-conjugate priors. As the number of sensing antennas increases, these estimators converge to the Bayesian Cram\'er-Rao bound (BCRB). We also establish that the achievable rate-Cram\'er-Rao bound (R-CRB) serves as an OB for the optimal C-D region, valid for both unbiased estimators and asymptotically large numbers of receive antennas. To clarify that the input distribution determines the tradeoff across the Pareto boundary of the C-D region, we propose two algorithms: i) an iterative Blahut-Arimoto algorithm (BAA)-type method, and ii) a memory-efficient closed-form (CF) approach. The CF approach includes a CF optimal distribution for high optical signal-to-noise ratio (O-SNR) conditions. Additionally, we adapt and refine the deterministic-random tradeoff (DRT) to this optical ISAC context.
Critique-out-Loud Reward Models
Authors: Zachary Ankner, Mansheej Paul, Brandon Cui, Jonathan D. Chang, Prithviraj Ammanabrolu
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Traditionally, reward models used for reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) are trained to directly predict preference scores without leveraging the generation capabilities of the underlying large language model (LLM). This limits the capabilities of reward models as they must reason implicitly about the quality of a response, i.e., preference modeling must be performed in a single forward pass through the model. To enable reward models to reason explicitly about the quality of a response, we introduce Critique-out-Loud (CLoud) reward models. CLoud reward models operate by first generating a natural language critique of the assistant's response that is then used to predict a scalar reward for the quality of the response. We demonstrate the success of CLoud reward models for both Llama-3-8B and 70B base models: compared to classic reward models CLoud reward models improve pairwise preference classification accuracy on RewardBench by 4.65 and 5.84 percentage points for the 8B and 70B base models respectively. Furthermore, CLoud reward models lead to a Pareto improvement for win rate on ArenaHard when used as the scoring model for Best-of-N. Finally, we explore how to exploit the dynamic inference compute capabilities of CLoud reward models by performing self-consistency decoding for reward prediction.
RFID based Health Adherence Medicine Case Using Fair Federated Learning
Authors: Ali Kamrani khodaei, Sina Hajer Ahmadi
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Federated Learning

Medication nonadherence significantly reduces the effectiveness of therapies, yet it remains prevalent among patients. Nonadherence has been linked to adverse outcomes, including increased risks of mortality and hospitalization. Although various methods exist to help patients track medication schedules, such as the Intelligent Drug Administration System (IDAS) and Smart Blister, these tools often face challenges that hinder their commercial viability. Building on the principles of dosage measurement and information communication in IoT, we introduce the Smart Pill Case a smart health adherence tool that leverages RFID-based data recording and NFC-based data extraction. This system incorporates a load cell for precise dosage measurement and features an Android app to monitor medication intake, offer suggestions, and issue warnings. To enhance the effectiveness and personalization of the Smart Pill Case, we propose integrating federated learning into the system. Federated learning allows the Smart Pill Case to learn from medication adherence patterns across multiple users without compromising individual privacy. By training machine learning models on decentralized data collected from various Smart Pill Cases, the system can continuously improve its recommendations and warnings, adapting to the diverse needs and behaviors of users. This approach not only enhances the tools ability to support medication adherence but also ensures that sensitive user data remains secure and private.
Mixed Sparsity Training: Achieving 4$\times$ FLOP Reduction for Transformer Pretraining
Authors: Pihe Hu, Shaolong Li, Longbo Huang
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU

Large language models (LLMs) have made significant strides in complex tasks, yet their widespread adoption is impeded by substantial computational demands. With hundreds of billion parameters, transformer-based LLMs necessitate months of pretraining across a high-end GPU cluster. However, this paper reveals a compelling finding: transformers exhibit considerable redundancy in pretraining computations, which motivates our proposed solution, Mixed Sparsity Training (MST), an efficient pretraining method that can reduce about $75\%$ of Floating Point Operations (FLOPs) while maintaining performance. MST integrates dynamic sparse training (DST) with Sparsity Variation (SV) and Hybrid Sparse Attention (HSA) during pretraining, involving three distinct phases: warm-up, ultra-sparsification, and restoration. The warm-up phase transforms the dense model into a sparse one, and the restoration phase reinstates connections. Throughout these phases, the model is trained with a dynamically evolving sparse topology and an HSA mechanism to maintain performance and minimize training FLOPs concurrently. Our experiment on GPT-2 showcases a FLOP reduction of $4\times$ without compromising performance.
MARLIN: Mixed-Precision Auto-Regressive Parallel Inference on Large Language Models
Authors: Elias Frantar, Roberto L. Castro, Jiale Chen, Torsten Hoefler, Dan Alistarh
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, Quantization, Scheduling

As inference on Large Language Models (LLMs) emerges as an important workload in machine learning applications, weight quantization has become a standard technique for efficient GPU deployment. Quantization not only reduces model size, but has also been shown to yield substantial speedups for single-user inference, due to reduced memory movement, with low accuracy impact. Yet, it remains open whether speedups are achievable also in \emph{batched} settings with multiple parallel clients, which are highly relevant for practical serving. It is unclear whether GPU kernels can be designed to remain practically memory-bound, while supporting the substantially increased compute requirements of batched workloads. This paper resolves this question positively by describing the design of Mixed-precision Auto-Regressive LINear kernels, called MARLIN. Concretely, given a model whose weights are compressed via quantization to, e.g., 4 bits per element, MARLIN shows that batchsizes up to 16-32 can be supported with close to maximum ($4\times$) quantization speedup, and larger batchsizes up to 64-128 with gradually decreasing, but still significant, acceleration. MARLIN accomplishes this via a combination of techniques, such as asynchronous memory access, complex task scheduling and pipelining, and bespoke quantization support. Our experiments show that MARLIN's near-optimal performance on individual LLM layers across different scenarios can also lead to end-to-end LLM inference speedups (of up to $2.8\times$) when integrated with the popular vLLM serving engine. Finally, MARLIN is extensible to further compression techniques, like NVIDIA 2:4 sparsity, leading to additional speedups.
Plug-in estimation of Schrödinger bridges
Authors: Aram-Alexandre Pooladian, Jonathan Niles-Weed
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00

We propose a procedure for estimating the Schr\"odinger bridge between two probability distributions. Unlike existing approaches, our method does not require iteratively simulating forward and backward diffusions or training neural networks to fit unknown drifts. Instead, we show that the potentials obtained from solving the static entropic optimal transport problem between the source and target samples can be modified to yield a natural plug-in estimator of the time-dependent drift that defines the bridge between two measures. Under minimal assumptions, we show that our proposal, which we call the \emph{Sinkhorn bridge}, provably estimates the Schr\"odinger bridge with a rate of convergence that depends on the intrinsic dimensionality of the target measure. Our approach combines results from the areas of sampling, and theoretical and statistical entropic optimal transport.
First line of defense: A robust first layer mitigates adversarial attacks
Authors: Janani Suresh, Nancy Nayak, Sheetal Kalyani
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising

Adversarial training (AT) incurs significant computational overhead, leading to growing interest in designing inherently robust architectures. We demonstrate that a carefully designed first layer of the neural network can serve as an implicit adversarial noise filter (ANF). This filter is created using a combination of large kernel size, increased convolution filters, and a maxpool operation. We show that integrating this filter as the first layer in architectures such as ResNet, VGG, and EfficientNet results in adversarially robust networks. Our approach achieves higher adversarial accuracies than existing natively robust architectures without AT and is competitive with adversarial-trained architectures across a wide range of datasets. Supporting our findings, we show that (a) the decision regions for our method have better margins, (b) the visualized loss surfaces are smoother, (c) the modified peak signal-to-noise ratio (mPSNR) values at the output of the ANF are higher, (d) high-frequency components are more attenuated, and (e) architectures incorporating ANF exhibit better denoising in Gaussian noise compared to baseline architectures. Code for all our experiments are available at \url{https://github.com/janani-suresh-97/first-line-defence.git}.
Optimizing Federated Graph Learning with Inherent Structural Knowledge and Dual-Densely Connected GNNs
Authors: Longwen Wang, Jianchun Liu, Zhi Liu, Jinyang Huang
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Learning

Federated Graph Learning (FGL) is an emerging technology that enables clients to collaboratively train powerful Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) in a distributed manner without exposing their private data. Nevertheless, FGL still faces the challenge of the severe non-Independent and Identically Distributed (non-IID) nature of graphs, which possess diverse node and edge structures, especially across varied domains. Thus, exploring the knowledge inherent in these structures becomes significantly crucial. Existing methods, however, either overlook the inherent structural knowledge in graph data or capture it at the cost of significantly increased resource demands (e.g., FLOPs and communication bandwidth), which can be detrimental to distributed paradigms. Inspired by this, we propose FedDense, a novel FGL framework that optimizes the utilization efficiency of inherent structural knowledge. To better acquire knowledge of diverse and underexploited structures, FedDense first explicitly encodes the structural knowledge inherent within graph data itself alongside node features. Besides, FedDense introduces a Dual-Densely Connected (DDC) GNN architecture that exploits the multi-scale (i.e., one-hop to multi-hop) feature and structure insights embedded in the aggregated feature maps at each layer. In addition to the exploitation of inherent structures, we consider resource limitations in FGL, devising exceedingly narrow layers atop the DDC architecture and adopting a selective parameter sharing strategy to reduce resource costs substantially. We conduct extensive experiments using 15 datasets across 4 different domains, demonstrating that FedDense consistently surpasses baselines by a large margin in training performance, while demanding minimal resources.
Macformer: Transformer with Random Maclaurin Feature Attention
Authors: Yuhan Guo, Lizhong Ding, Ye Yuan, Guoren Wang
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00

Random feature attention (RFA) adopts random fourier feature (RFF) methods to approximate the softmax function, resulting in a linear time and space attention mechanism that enables the construction of an efficient Transformer. Inspired by RFA, we propose Macformer, a Transformer architecture that employs random Maclaurin features (RMF) to approximate various dot-product kernels, thereby accelerating attention computations for long sequence. Macformer consists of Random Maclaurin Feature Attention (RMFA) and pre-post Scaling Batch Normalization (ppSBN), the former is an unbiased approximation for dot-product kernelized attention and the later is a two-stage regularization mechanism guaranteeing the error of RMFA. We conducted toy experiments to demonstrate the efficiency of RMFA and ppSBN, and experiments on long range arena (LRA) benchmark to validate the acceleration and accuracy of Macformer with different dot-product kernels. Experiment results of Macformer are consistent with our theoretical analysis.
Estimated Audio-Caption Correspondences Improve Language-Based Audio Retrieval
Authors: Paul Primus, Florian Schmid, Gerhard Widmer
Date: 2024-08-21 00:00:00
Tasks: AudioCaps, Contrastive Learning, Retrieval, Text to Audio Retrieval

Dual-encoder-based audio retrieval systems are commonly optimized with contrastive learning on a set of matching and mismatching audio-caption pairs. This leads to a shared embedding space in which corresponding items from the two modalities end up close together. Since audio-caption datasets typically only contain matching pairs of recordings and descriptions, it has become common practice to create mismatching pairs by pairing the audio with a caption randomly drawn from the dataset. This is not ideal because the randomly sampled caption could, just by chance, partly or entirely describe the audio recording. However, correspondence information for all possible pairs is costly to annotate and thus typically unavailable; we, therefore, suggest substituting it with estimated correspondences. To this end, we propose a two-staged training procedure in which multiple retrieval models are first trained as usual, i.e., without estimated correspondences. In the second stage, the audio-caption correspondences predicted by these models then serve as prediction targets. We evaluate our method on the ClothoV2 and the AudioCaps benchmark and show that it improves retrieval performance, even in a restricting self-distillation setting where a single model generates and then learns from the estimated correspondences. We further show that our method outperforms the current state of the art by 1.6 pp. mAP@10 on the ClothoV2 benchmark.