pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
PureDiffusion: Using Backdoor to Counter Backdoor in Generative Diffusion Models
Authors: Vu Tuan Truong, Long Bao Le
Date: 2024-09-20 00:00:00
Tasks: backdoor defense

Diffusion models (DMs) are advanced deep learning models that achieved state-of-the-art capability on a wide range of generative tasks. However, recent studies have shown their vulnerability regarding backdoor attacks, in which backdoored DMs consistently generate a designated result (e.g., a harmful image) called backdoor target when the models' input contains a backdoor trigger. Although various backdoor techniques have been investigated to attack DMs, defense methods against these threats are still limited and underexplored, especially in inverting the backdoor trigger. In this paper, we introduce PureDiffusion, a novel backdoor defense framework that can efficiently detect backdoor attacks by inverting backdoor triggers embedded in DMs. Our extensive experiments on various trigger-target pairs show that PureDiffusion outperforms existing defense methods with a large gap in terms of fidelity (i.e., how much the inverted trigger resembles the original trigger) and backdoor success rate (i.e., the rate that the inverted trigger leads to the corresponding backdoor target). Notably, in certain cases, backdoor triggers inverted by PureDiffusion even achieve higher attack success rate than the original triggers.
Drift to Remember
Authors: Jin Du, Xinhe Zhang, Hao Shen, Xun Xian, Ganghua Wang, Jiawei Zhang, Yuhong Yang, Na Li, Jia Liu, Jie Ding
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: GPU, image-classification, Image Classification, Lifelong learning, Question Answering, Sentiment Analysis

Lifelong learning in artificial intelligence (AI) aims to mimic the biological brain's ability to continuously learn and retain knowledge, yet it faces challenges such as catastrophic forgetting. Recent neuroscience research suggests that neural activity in biological systems undergoes representational drift, where neural responses evolve over time, even with consistent inputs and tasks. We hypothesize that representational drift can alleviate catastrophic forgetting in AI during new task acquisition. To test this, we introduce DriftNet, a network designed to constantly explore various local minima in the loss landscape while dynamically retrieving relevant tasks. This approach ensures efficient integration of new information and preserves existing knowledge. Experimental studies in image classification and natural language processing demonstrate that DriftNet outperforms existing models in lifelong learning. Importantly, DriftNet is scalable in handling a sequence of tasks such as sentiment analysis and question answering using large language models (LLMs) with billions of parameters on a single Nvidia A100 GPU. DriftNet efficiently updates LLMs using only new data, avoiding the need for full dataset retraining. Tested on GPT-2 and RoBERTa, DriftNet is a robust, cost-effective solution for lifelong learning in LLMs. This study not only advances AI systems to emulate biological learning, but also provides insights into the adaptive mechanisms of biological neural systems, deepening our understanding of lifelong learning in nature.
The use of GPT-4o and Other Large Language Models for the Improvement and Design of Self-Assessment Scales for Measurement of Interpersonal Communication Skills
Authors: Goran Bubaš
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00

OpenAI's ChatGPT (GPT-4 and GPT-4o) and other Large Language Models (LLMs) like Microsoft's Copilot, Google's Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Antrophic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet can be effectively used in various phases of scientific research. Their performance in diverse verbal tasks and reasoning is close to or above the average human level and rapidly increasing, providing those models with a capacity that resembles a relatively high level of theory of mind. The current ability of LLMs to process information about human psychology and communication creates an opportunity for their scientific use in the fields of personality psychology and interpersonal communication skills. This article illustrates the possible uses of GPT-4o and other advanced LLMs for typical tasks in designing self-assessment scales for interpersonal communication skills measurement like the selection and improvement of scale items and evaluation of content validity of scales. The potential for automated item generation and application is illustrated as well. The case study examples are accompanied by prompts for LLMs that can be useful for these purposes. Finally, a summary is provided of the potential benefits of using LLMs in the process of evaluation, design, and improvement of interpersonal communication skills self-assessment scales.
Normalized Narrow Jump To Conclusions: Normalized Narrow Shortcuts for Parameter Efficient Early Exit Transformer Prediction
Authors: Amrit Diggavi Seshadri
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00

With the size and cost of large transformer-based language models growing, recently, there has been interest in shortcut casting of early transformer hidden-representations to final-representations for cheaper model inference. In particular, shortcutting pre-trained transformers with linear transformations over early layers has been shown to improve precision in early inference. However, for large language models, even this becomes computationally expensive. In this work, we propose Narrow Jump to Conclusions (NJTC) and Normalized Narrow Jump to Conclusions (N-NJTC) - parameter efficient alternatives to standard linear shortcutting that reduces shortcut parameter count by over 97%. We show that N-NJTC reliably outperforms Identity shortcuts at early stages and offers stable precision from all transformer block levels for GPT-2-XL, Phi3-Mini and Llama2-7B transformer models, demonstrating the viability of more parameter efficient short-cutting approaches.
FineMolTex: Towards Fine-grained Molecular Graph-Text Pre-training
Authors: Yibo Li, Yuan Fang, Mengmei Zhang, Chuan Shi
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Discovery, molecular representation, Representation Learning

Understanding molecular structure and related knowledge is crucial for scientific research. Recent studies integrate molecular graphs with their textual descriptions to enhance molecular representation learning. However, they focus on the whole molecular graph and neglect frequently occurring subgraphs, known as motifs,which are essential for determining molecular properties. Without such fine-grained knowledge, these models struggle to generalize to unseen molecules and tasks that require motif-level insights. To bridge this gap, we propose FineMolTex, a novel Fine-grained Molecular graph-Text pre-training framework to jointly learn coarse-grained molecule-level knowledge and fine-grained motif-level knowledge. Specifically, FineMolTex consists of two pre-training tasks: a contrastive alignment task for coarse-grained matching and a masked multi-modal modeling task for fine-grained matching. In particular, the latter predicts the labels of masked motifs and words, leveraging insights from each other, thereby enabling FineMolTex to understand the fine-grained matching between motifs and words. Finally, we conduct extensive experiments across three downstream tasks, achieving up to 230% improvement in the text-based molecule editing task. Additionally, our case studies reveal that FineMolTex successfully captures fine-grained knowledge, potentially offering valuable insights for drug discovery and catalyst design.
An Evolutionary Algorithm For the Vehicle Routing Problem with Drones with Interceptions
Authors: Carlos Pambo, Jacomine Grobler
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Scheduling

The use of trucks and drones as a solution to address last-mile delivery challenges is a new and promising research direction explored in this paper. The variation of the problem where the drone can intercept the truck while in movement or at the customer location is part of an optimisation problem called the vehicle routing problem with drones with interception (VRPDi). This paper proposes an evolutionary algorithm to solve the VRPDi. In this variation of the VRPDi, multiple pairs of trucks and drones need to be scheduled. The pairs leave and return to a depot location together or separately to make deliveries to customer nodes. The drone can intercept the truck after the delivery or meet up with the truck at the following customer location. The algorithm was executed on the travelling salesman problem with drones (TSPD) datasets by Bouman et al. (2015), and the performance of the algorithm was compared by benchmarking the results of the VRPDi against the results of the VRP of the same dataset. This comparison showed improvements in total delivery time between 39% and 60%. Further detailed analysis of the algorithm results examined the total delivery time, distance, node delivery scheduling and the degree of diversity during the algorithm execution. This analysis also considered how the algorithm handled the VRPDi constraints. The results of the algorithm were then benchmarked against algorithms in Dillon et al. (2023) and Ernst (2024). The latter solved the problem with a maximum drone distance constraint added to the VRPDi. The analysis and benchmarking of the algorithm results showed that the algorithm satisfactorily solved 50 and 100-nodes problems in a reasonable amount of time, and the solutions found were better than those found by the algorithms in Dillon et al. (2023) and Ernst (2024) for the same problems.
Democratising Artificial Intelligence for Pandemic Preparedness and Global Governance in Latin American and Caribbean Countries
Authors: Andre de Carvalho, Robson Bonidia, Jude Dzevela Kong, Mariana Dauhajre, Claudio Struchiner, Guilherme Goedert, Peter F. Stadler, Maria Emilia Walter, Danilo Sanches, Troy Day, Marcia Castro, John Edmunds, Manuel Colome-Hidalgo, Demian Arturo Herrera Morban, Edian F. Franco, Cesar Ugarte-Gil, Patricia Espinoza-Lopez, Gabriel Carrasco-Escobar, Ulisses Rocha
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation

Infectious diseases, transmitted directly or indirectly, are among the leading causes of epidemics and pandemics. Consequently, several open challenges exist in predicting epidemic outbreaks, detecting variants, tracing contacts, discovering new drugs, and fighting misinformation. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can provide tools to deal with these scenarios, demonstrating promising results in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic. AI is becoming increasingly integrated into various aspects of society. However, ensuring that AI benefits are distributed equitably and that they are used responsibly is crucial. Multiple countries are creating regulations to address these concerns, but the borderless nature of AI requires global cooperation to define regulatory and guideline consensus. Considering this, The Global South AI for Pandemic & Epidemic Preparedness & Response Network (AI4PEP) has developed an initiative comprising 16 projects across 16 countries in the Global South, seeking to strengthen equitable and responsive public health systems that leverage Southern-led responsible AI solutions to improve prevention, preparedness, and response to emerging and re-emerging infectious disease outbreaks. This opinion introduces our branches in Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries and discusses AI governance in LAC in the light of biotechnology. Our network in LAC has high potential to help fight infectious diseases, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, generating opportunities for the widespread use of AI techniques to improve the health and well-being of their communities.
Addressing and Visualizing Misalignments in Human Task-Solving Trajectories
Authors: Sejin Kim, Hosung Lee, Sundong Kim
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00

Understanding misalignments in human task-solving trajectories is crucial for enhancing AI models trained to closely mimic human reasoning. This study categorizes such misalignments into three types: (1) lack of functions to express intent, (2) inefficient action sequences, and (3) incorrect intentions that cannot solve the task. To address these issues, we first formalize and define these three misalignment types in a unified framework. We then propose a heuristic algorithm to detect misalignments in ARCTraj trajectories and analyze their impact hierarchically and quantitatively. We also present an intention estimation method based on our formalism that infers missing alignment between user actions and intentions. Through trajectory alignment, we experimentally demonstrate that AI models trained on human task-solving trajectories improve performance in mimicking human reasoning. Based on hierarchical analysis and experiments, we highlight the importance of trajectory-intention alignment and demonstrate the effectiveness of intention-aligned training.
Loop Neural Networks for Parameter Sharing
Authors: Kei-Sing Ng, Qingchen Wang
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Text Generation

The success of large-scale language models like GPT can be attributed to their ability to efficiently predict the next token in a sequence. However, these models rely on constant computational effort regardless of the complexity of the token they are predicting, lacking the capacity for iterative refinement. In this paper, we introduce a novel Loop Neural Network, which achieves better performance by utilizing longer computational time without increasing the model size. Our approach revisits the input multiple times, refining the prediction by iteratively looping over a subset of the model with residual connections. We demonstrate the effectiveness of this method through experiments comparing versions of GPT-2 with our loop models, showing improved performance in language modeling tasks while maintaining similar parameter counts. Importantly, these improvements are achieved without the need for extra training data.
AI Assistants for Spaceflight Procedures: Combining Generative Pre-Trained Transformer and Retrieval-Augmented Generation on Knowledge Graphs With Augmented Reality Cues
Authors: Oliver Bensch, Leonie Bensch, Tommy Nilsson, Florian Saling, Bernd Bewer, Sophie Jentzsch, Tobias Hecking, J. Nathan Kutz
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Graphs, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

This paper describes the capabilities and potential of the intelligent personal assistant (IPA) CORE (Checklist Organizer for Research and Exploration), designed to support astronauts during procedures onboard the International Space Station (ISS), the Lunar Gateway station, and beyond. We reflect on the importance of a reliable and flexible assistant capable of offline operation and highlight the usefulness of audiovisual interaction using augmented reality elements to intuitively display checklist information. We argue that current approaches to the design of IPAs in space operations fall short of meeting these criteria. Therefore, we propose CORE as an assistant that combines Knowledge Graphs (KGs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) for a Generative Pre-Trained Transformer (GPT), and Augmented Reality (AR) elements to ensure an intuitive understanding of procedure steps, reliability, offline availability, and flexibility in terms of response style and procedure updates.
Predicting Coronary Heart Disease Using a Suite of Machine Learning Models
Authors: Jamal Al-Karaki, Philip Ilono, Sanchit Baweja, Jalal Naghiyev, Raja Singh Yadav, Muhammad Al-Zafar Khan
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00

Coronary Heart Disease affects millions of people worldwide and is a well-studied area of healthcare. There are many viable and accurate methods for the diagnosis and prediction of heart disease, but they have limiting points such as invasiveness, late detection, or cost. Supervised learning via machine learning algorithms presents a low-cost (computationally speaking), non-invasive solution that can be a precursor for early diagnosis. In this study, we applied several well-known methods and benchmarked their performance against each other. It was found that Random Forest with oversampling of the predictor variable produced the highest accuracy of 84%.
HM3D-OVON: A Dataset and Benchmark for Open-Vocabulary Object Goal Navigation
Authors: Naoki Yokoyama, Ram Ramrakhya, Abhishek Das, Dhruv Batra, Sehoon Ha
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Navigate, Visual Navigation

We present the Habitat-Matterport 3D Open Vocabulary Object Goal Navigation dataset (HM3D-OVON), a large-scale benchmark that broadens the scope and semantic range of prior Object Goal Navigation (ObjectNav) benchmarks. Leveraging the HM3DSem dataset, HM3D-OVON incorporates over 15k annotated instances of household objects across 379 distinct categories, derived from photo-realistic 3D scans of real-world environments. In contrast to earlier ObjectNav datasets, which limit goal objects to a predefined set of 6-20 categories, HM3D-OVON facilitates the training and evaluation of models with an open-set of goals defined through free-form language at test-time. Through this open-vocabulary formulation, HM3D-OVON encourages progress towards learning visuo-semantic navigation behaviors that are capable of searching for any object specified by text in an open-vocabulary manner. Additionally, we systematically evaluate and compare several different types of approaches on HM3D-OVON. We find that HM3D-OVON can be used to train an open-vocabulary ObjectNav agent that achieves both higher performance and is more robust to localization and actuation noise than the state-of-the-art ObjectNav approach. We hope that our benchmark and baseline results will drive interest in developing embodied agents that can navigate real-world spaces to find household objects specified through free-form language, taking a step towards more flexible and human-like semantic visual navigation. Code and videos available at: naoki.io/ovon.
UU-Mamba: Uncertainty-aware U-Mamba for Cardiovascular Segmentation
Authors: Ting Yu Tsai, Li Lin, Shu Hu, Connie W. Tsao, Xin Li, Ming-Ching Chang, Hongtu Zhu, Xin Wang
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Mamba, Segmentation

Building on the success of deep learning models in cardiovascular structure segmentation, increasing attention has been focused on improving generalization and robustness, particularly in small, annotated datasets. Despite recent advancements, current approaches often face challenges such as overfitting and accuracy limitations, largely due to their reliance on large datasets and narrow optimization techniques. This paper introduces the UU-Mamba model, an extension of the U-Mamba architecture, designed to address these challenges in both cardiac and vascular segmentation. By incorporating Sharpness-Aware Minimization (SAM), the model enhances generalization by targeting flatter minima in the loss landscape. Additionally, we propose an uncertainty-aware loss function that combines region-based, distribution-based, and pixel-based components to improve segmentation accuracy by capturing both local and global features. While the UU-Mamba model has already demonstrated great performance, further testing is required to fully assess its generalization and robustness. We expand our evaluation by conducting new trials on the ImageCAS (coronary artery) and Aorta (aortic branches and zones) datasets, which present more complex segmentation challenges than the ACDC dataset (left and right ventricles) used in our previous work, showcasing the model's adaptability and resilience. We confirm UU-Mamba's superior performance over leading models such as TransUNet, Swin-Unet, nnUNet, and nnFormer. Moreover, we provide a more comprehensive evaluation of the model's robustness and segmentation accuracy, as demonstrated by extensive experiments.
LLMs are One-Shot URL Classifiers and Explainers
Authors: Fariza Rashid, Nishavi Ranaweera, Ben Doyle, Suranga Seneviratne
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation, Informativeness, One-Shot Learning

Malicious URL classification represents a crucial aspect of cyber security. Although existing work comprises numerous machine learning and deep learning-based URL classification models, most suffer from generalisation and domain-adaptation issues arising from the lack of representative training datasets. Furthermore, these models fail to provide explanations for a given URL classification in natural human language. In this work, we investigate and demonstrate the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to address this issue. Specifically, we propose an LLM-based one-shot learning framework that uses Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning to predict whether a given URL is benign or phishing. We evaluate our framework using three URL datasets and five state-of-the-art LLMs and show that one-shot LLM prompting indeed provides performances close to supervised models, with GPT 4-Turbo being the best model, followed by Claude 3 Opus. We conduct a quantitative analysis of the LLM explanations and show that most of the explanations provided by LLMs align with the post-hoc explanations of the supervised classifiers, and the explanations have high readability, coherency, and informativeness.
MANTA -- Model Adapter Native generations that's Affordable
Authors: Ansh Chaurasia
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, model, Synthetic Data Generation

The presiding model generation algorithms rely on simple, inflexible adapter selection to provide personalized results. We propose the model-adapter composition problem as a generalized problem to past work factoring in practical hardware and affordability constraints, and introduce MANTA as a new approach to the problem. Experiments on COCO 2014 validation show MANTA to be superior in image task diversity and quality at the cost of a modest drop in alignment. Our system achieves a $94\%$ win rate in task diversity and a $80\%$ task quality win rate versus the best known system, and demonstrates strong potential for direct use in synthetic data generation and the creative art domains.
To Err Is AI! Debugging as an Intervention to Facilitate Appropriate Reliance on AI Systems
Authors: Gaole He, Abri Bharos, Ujwal Gadiraju
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00

Powerful predictive AI systems have demonstrated great potential in augmenting human decision making. Recent empirical work has argued that the vision for optimal human-AI collaboration requires 'appropriate reliance' of humans on AI systems. However, accurately estimating the trustworthiness of AI advice at the instance level is quite challenging, especially in the absence of performance feedback pertaining to the AI system. In practice, the performance disparity of machine learning models on out-of-distribution data makes the dataset-specific performance feedback unreliable in human-AI collaboration. Inspired by existing literature on critical thinking and a critical mindset, we propose the use of debugging an AI system as an intervention to foster appropriate reliance. In this paper, we explore whether a critical evaluation of AI performance within a debugging setting can better calibrate users' assessment of an AI system and lead to more appropriate reliance. Through a quantitative empirical study (N = 234), we found that our proposed debugging intervention does not work as expected in facilitating appropriate reliance. Instead, we observe a decrease in reliance on the AI system after the intervention -- potentially resulting from an early exposure to the AI system's weakness. We explore the dynamics of user confidence and user estimation of AI trustworthiness across groups with different performance levels to help explain how inappropriate reliance patterns occur. Our findings have important implications for designing effective interventions to facilitate appropriate reliance and better human-AI collaboration.