pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
FAMOUS: Flexible Accelerator for the Attention Mechanism of Transformer on UltraScale+ FPGAs
Authors: Ehsan Kabir, Md. Arafat Kabir, Austin R. J. Downey, Jason D. Bakos, David Andrews, Miaoqing Huang
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: CPU, GPU, Machine Translation

Transformer neural networks (TNNs) are being applied across a widening range of application domains, including natural language processing (NLP), machine translation, and computer vision (CV). Their popularity is largely attributed to the exceptional performance of their multi-head self-attention blocks when analyzing sequential data and extracting features. To date, there are limited hardware accelerators tailored for this mechanism, which is the first step before designing an accelerator for a complete model. This paper proposes \textit{FAMOUS}, a flexible hardware accelerator for dense multi-head attention (MHA) computation of TNNs on field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). It is optimized for high utilization of processing elements and on-chip memories to improve parallelism and reduce latency. An efficient tiling of large matrices has been employed to distribute memory and computing resources across different modules on various FPGA platforms. The design is evaluated on Xilinx Alveo U55C and U200 data center cards containing Ultrascale+ FPGAs. Experimental results are presented that show that it can attain a maximum throughput, number of parallel attention heads, embedding dimension and tile size of 328 (giga operations/second (GOPS)), 8, 768 and 64 respectively on the U55C. Furthermore, it is 3.28$\times$ and 2.6$\times$ faster than the Intel Xeon Gold 5220R CPU and NVIDIA V100 GPU respectively. It is also 1.3$\times$ faster than the fastest state-of-the-art FPGA-based accelerator.
PepINVENT: Generative peptide design beyond the natural amino acids
Authors: Gökçe Geylan, Jon Paul Janet, Alessandro Tibo, Jiazhen He, Atanas Patronov, Mikhail Kabeshov, Florian David, Werngard Czechtizky, Ola Engkvist, Leonardo De Maria
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Drug Design

Peptides play a crucial role in the drug design and discovery whether as a therapeutic modality or a delivery agent. Non-natural amino acids (NNAAs) have been used to enhance the peptide properties from binding affinity, plasma stability to permeability. Incorporating novel NNAAs facilitates the design of more effective peptides with improved properties. The generative models used in the field, have focused on navigating the peptide sequence space. The sequence space is formed by combinations of a predefined set of amino acids. However, there is still a need for a tool to explore the peptide landscape beyond this enumerated space to unlock and effectively incorporate de novo design of new amino acids. To thoroughly explore the theoretical chemical space of the peptides, we present PepINVENT, a novel generative AI-based tool as an extension to the small molecule molecular design platform, REINVENT. PepINVENT navigates the vast space of natural and non-natural amino acids to propose valid, novel, and diverse peptide designs. The generative model can serve as a central tool for peptide-related tasks, as it was not trained on peptides with specific properties or topologies. The prior was trained to understand the granularity of peptides and to design amino acids for filling the masked positions within a peptide. PepINVENT coupled with reinforcement learning enables the goal-oriented design of peptides using its chemistry-informed generative capabilities. This study demonstrates PepINVENT's ability to explore the peptide space with unique and novel designs, and its capacity for property optimization in the context of therapeutically relevant peptides. Our tool can be employed for multi-parameter learning objectives, peptidomimetics, lead optimization, and variety of other tasks within the peptide domain.
KALIE: Fine-Tuning Vision-Language Models for Open-World Manipulation without Robot Data
Authors: Grace Tang, Swetha Rajkumar, Yifei Zhou, Homer Rich Walke, Sergey Levine, Kuan Fang
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00

Building generalist robotic systems involves effectively endowing robots with the capabilities to handle novel objects in an open-world setting. Inspired by the advances of large pre-trained models, we propose Keypoint Affordance Learning from Imagined Environments (KALIE), which adapts pre-trained Vision Language Models (VLMs) for robotic control in a scalable manner. Instead of directly producing motor commands, KALIE controls the robot by predicting point-based affordance representations based on natural language instructions and visual observations of the scene. The VLM is trained on 2D images with affordances labeled by humans, bypassing the need for training data collected on robotic systems. Through an affordance-aware data synthesis pipeline, KALIE automatically creates massive high-quality training data based on limited example data manually collected by humans. We demonstrate that KALIE can learn to robustly solve new manipulation tasks with unseen objects given only 50 example data points. Compared to baselines using pre-trained VLMs, our approach consistently achieves superior performance.
N-Version Assessment and Enhancement of Generative AI
Authors: Marcus Kessel, Colin Atkinson
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

Generative AI (GAI) holds great potential to improve software engineering productivity, but its untrustworthy outputs, particularly in code synthesis, pose significant challenges. The need for extensive verification and validation (V&V) of GAI-generated artifacts may undermine the potential productivity gains. This paper proposes a way of mitigating these risks by exploiting GAI's ability to generate multiple versions of code and tests to facilitate comparative analysis across versions. Rather than relying on the quality of a single test or code module, this "differential GAI" (D-GAI) approach promotes more reliable quality evaluation through version diversity. We introduce the Large-Scale Software Observatorium (LASSO), a platform that supports D-GAI by executing and analyzing large sets of code versions and tests. We discuss how LASSO enables rigorous evaluation of GAI-generated artifacts and propose its application in both software development and GAI research.
One-shot World Models Using a Transformer Trained on a Synthetic Prior
Authors: Fabio Ferreira, Moreno Schlageter, Raghu Rajan, Andre Biedenkapp, Frank Hutter
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning

A World Model is a compressed spatial and temporal representation of a real world environment that allows one to train an agent or execute planning methods. However, world models are typically trained on observations from the real world environment, and they usually do not enable learning policies for other real environments. We propose One-Shot World Model (OSWM), a transformer world model that is learned in an in-context learning fashion from purely synthetic data sampled from a prior distribution. Our prior is composed of multiple randomly initialized neural networks, where each network models the dynamics of each state and reward dimension of a desired target environment. We adopt the supervised learning procedure of Prior-Fitted Networks by masking next-state and reward at random context positions and query OSWM to make probabilistic predictions based on the remaining transition context. During inference time, OSWM is able to quickly adapt to the dynamics of a simple grid world, as well as the CartPole gym and a custom control environment by providing 1k transition steps as context and is then able to successfully train environment-solving agent policies. However, transferring to more complex environments remains a challenge, currently. Despite these limitations, we see this work as an important stepping-stone in the pursuit of learning world models purely from synthetic data.
Present and Future Generalization of Synthetic Image Detectors
Authors: Pablo Bernabeu-Perez, Enrique Lopez-Cuena, Dario Garcia-Gasulla
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Diversity, Synthetic Image Attribution, Synthetic Image Detection

The continued release of increasingly realistic image generation models creates a demand for synthetic image detectors. To build effective detectors we must first understand how factors like data source diversity, training methodologies and image alterations affect their generalization capabilities. This work conducts a systematic analysis and uses its insights to develop practical guidelines for training robust synthetic image detectors. Model generalization capabilities are evaluated across different setups (e.g. scale, sources, transformations) including real-world deployment conditions. Through an extensive benchmarking of state-of-the-art detectors across diverse and recent datasets, we show that while current approaches excel in specific scenarios, no single detector achieves universal effectiveness. Critical flaws are identified in detectors, and workarounds are proposed to enable the deployment of real-world detector applications enhancing accuracy, reliability and robustness beyond the limitations of current systems.
MSSDA: Multi-Sub-Source Adaptation for Diabetic Foot Neuropathy Recognition
Authors: Yan Zhong, Zhixin Yan, Yi Xie, Shibin Wu, Huaidong Zhang, Lin Shu, Peiru Zhou
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Domain Adaptation

Diabetic foot neuropathy (DFN) is a critical factor leading to diabetic foot ulcers, which is one of the most common and severe complications of diabetes mellitus (DM) and is associated with high risks of amputation and mortality. Despite its significance, existing datasets do not directly derive from plantar data and lack continuous, long-term foot-specific information. To advance DFN research, we have collected a novel dataset comprising continuous plantar pressure data to recognize diabetic foot neuropathy. This dataset includes data from 94 DM patients with DFN and 41 DM patients without DFN. Moreover, traditional methods divide datasets by individuals, potentially leading to significant domain discrepancies in some feature spaces due to the absence of mid-domain data. In this paper, we propose an effective domain adaptation method to address this proplem. We split the dataset based on convolutional feature statistics and select appropriate sub-source domains to enhance efficiency and avoid negative transfer. We then align the distributions of each source and target domain pair in specific feature spaces to minimize the domain gap. Comprehensive results validate the effectiveness of our method on both the newly proposed dataset for DFN recognition and an existing dataset.
PathSeeker: Exploring LLM Security Vulnerabilities with a Reinforcement Learning-Based Jailbreak Approach
Authors: ZhiHao Lin, Wei Ma, Mingyi Zhou, Yanjie Zhao, Haoyu Wang, Yang Liu, Jun Wang, Li Li
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Multi-agent Reinforcement Learning, Safety Alignment

In recent years, Large Language Models (LLMs) have gained widespread use, raising concerns about their security. Traditional jailbreak attacks, which often rely on the model internal information or have limitations when exploring the unsafe behavior of the victim model, limiting their reducing their general applicability. In this paper, we introduce PathSeeker, a novel black-box jailbreak method, which is inspired by the game of rats escaping a maze. We think that each LLM has its unique "security maze", and attackers attempt to find the exit learning from the received feedback and their accumulated experience to compromise the target LLM's security defences. Our approach leverages multi-agent reinforcement learning, where smaller models collaborate to guide the main LLM in performing mutation operations to achieve the attack objectives. By progressively modifying inputs based on the model's feedback, our system induces richer, harmful responses. During our manual attempts to perform jailbreak attacks, we found that the vocabulary of the response of the target model gradually became richer and eventually produced harmful responses. Based on the observation, we also introduce a reward mechanism that exploits the expansion of vocabulary richness in LLM responses to weaken security constraints. Our method outperforms five state-of-the-art attack techniques when tested across 13 commercial and open-source LLMs, achieving high attack success rates, especially in strongly aligned commercial models like GPT-4o-mini, Claude-3.5, and GLM-4-air with strong safety alignment. This study aims to improve the understanding of LLM security vulnerabilities and we hope that this sturdy can contribute to the development of more robust defenses.
Data-Driven Approach to assess and identify gaps in healthcare set up in South Asia
Authors: Rusham Elahi, Zia Tahseen, Tehreem Fatima, Syed Wafa Zahra, Hafiz Muhammad Abubakar, Tehreem Zafar, Aqs Younas, Muhammad Talha Quddoos, Usman Nazir
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Earth Observation

Primary healthcare is a crucial strategy for achieving universal health coverage. South Asian countries are working to improve their primary healthcare system through their country specific policies designed in line with WHO health system framework using the six thematic pillars: Health Financing, Health Service delivery, Human Resource for Health, Health Information Systems, Governance, Essential Medicines and Technology, and an addition area of Cross-Sectoral Linkages. Measuring the current accessibility of healthcare facilities and workforce availability is essential for improving healthcare standards and achieving universal health coverage in developing countries. Data-driven surveillance approaches are required that can provide rapid, reliable, and geographically scalable solutions to understand a) which communities and areas are most at risk of inequitable access and when, b) what barriers to health access exist, and c) how they can be overcome in ways tailored to the specific challenges faced by individual communities. We propose to harness current breakthroughs in Earth-observation (EO) technology, which provide the ability to generate accurate, up-to-date, publicly accessible, and reliable data, which is necessary for equitable access planning and resource allocation to ensure that vaccines, and other interventions reach everyone, particularly those in greatest need, during normal and crisis times. This requires collaboration among countries to identify evidence based solutions to shape health policy and interventions, and drive innovations and research in the region.
MEGA-PT: A Meta-Game Framework for Agile Penetration Testing
Authors: Yunfei Ge, Quanyan Zhu
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00

Penetration testing is an essential means of proactive defense in the face of escalating cybersecurity incidents. Traditional manual penetration testing methods are time-consuming, resource-intensive, and prone to human errors. Current trends in automated penetration testing are also impractical, facing significant challenges such as the curse of dimensionality, scalability issues, and lack of adaptability to network changes. To address these issues, we propose MEGA-PT, a meta-game penetration testing framework, featuring micro tactic games for node-level local interactions and a macro strategy process for network-wide attack chains. The micro- and macro-level modeling enables distributed, adaptive, collaborative, and fast penetration testing. MEGA-PT offers agile solutions for various security schemes, including optimal local penetration plans, purple teaming solutions, and risk assessment, providing fundamental principles to guide future automated penetration testing. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and agility of our model by providing improved defense strategies and adaptability to changes at both local and network levels.
An Instance-based Plus Ensemble Learning Method for Classification of Scientific Papers
Authors: Fang Zhang, Shengli Wu
Date: 2024-09-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Classification, Ensemble Learning

The exponential growth of scientific publications in recent years has posed a significant challenge in effective and efficient categorization. This paper introduces a novel approach that combines instance-based learning and ensemble learning techniques for classifying scientific papers into relevant research fields. Working with a classification system with a group of research fields, first a number of typical seed papers are allocated to each of the fields manually. Then for each paper that needs to be classified, we compare it with all the seed papers in every field. Contents and citations are considered separately. An ensemble-based method is then employed to make the final decision. Experimenting with the datasets from DBLP, our experimental results demonstrate that the proposed classification method is effective and efficient in categorizing papers into various research areas. We also find that both content and citation features are useful for the classification of scientific papers.
Proof Automation with Large Language Models
Authors: Minghai Lu, Benjamin Delaware, Tianyi Zhang
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00

Interactive theorem provers such as Coq are powerful tools to formally guarantee the correctness of software. However, using these tools requires significant manual effort and expertise. While Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown promise in automatically generating informal proofs in natural language, they are less effective at generating formal proofs in interactive theorem provers. In this paper, we conduct a formative study to identify common mistakes made by LLMs when asked to generate formal proofs. By analyzing 520 proof generation errors made by GPT-3.5, we found that GPT-3.5 often identified the correct high-level structure of a proof, but struggled to get the lower-level details correct. Based on this insight, we propose PALM, a novel generate-then-repair approach that first prompts an LLM to generate an initial proof and then leverages targeted symbolic methods to iteratively repair low-level problems. We evaluate PALM on a large dataset that includes more than 10K theorems. Our results show that PALM significantly outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches, successfully proving 76.6% to 180.4% more theorems. Moreover, PALM proves 1270 theorems beyond the reach of existing approaches. We also demonstrate the generalizability of PALM across different LLMs.
DilateQuant: Accurate and Efficient Diffusion Quantization via Weight Dilation
Authors: Xuewen Liu, Zhikai Li, Qingyi Gu
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Generation, Knowledge Distillation, Quantization

Diffusion models have shown excellent performance on various image generation tasks, but the substantial computational costs and huge memory footprint hinder their low-latency applications in real-world scenarios. Quantization is a promising way to compress and accelerate models. Nevertheless, due to the wide range and time-varying activations in diffusion models, existing methods cannot maintain both accuracy and efficiency simultaneously for low-bit quantization. To tackle this issue, we propose DilateQuant, a novel quantization framework for diffusion models that offers comparable accuracy and high efficiency. Specifically, we keenly aware of numerous unsaturated in-channel weights, which can be cleverly exploited to reduce the range of activations without additional computation cost. Based on this insight, we propose Weight Dilation (WD) that maximally dilates the unsaturated in-channel weights to a constrained range through a mathematically equivalent scaling. WD costlessly absorbs the activation quantization errors into weight quantization. The range of activations decreases, which makes activations quantization easy. The range of weights remains constant, which makes model easy to converge in training stage. Considering the temporal network leads to time-varying activations, we design a Temporal Parallel Quantizer (TPQ), which sets time-step quantization parameters and supports parallel quantization for different time steps, significantly improving the performance and reducing time cost. To further enhance performance while preserving efficiency, we introduce a Block-wise Knowledge Distillation (BKD) to align the quantized models with the full-precision models at a block level. The simultaneous training of time-step quantization parameters and weights minimizes the time required, and the shorter backpropagation paths decreases the memory footprint of the quantization process.
Transforming Multidimensional Time Series into Interpretable Event Sequences for Advanced Data Mining
Authors: Xu Yan, Yaoting Jiang, Wenyi Liu, Didi Yi, Jianjun Wei
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Diagnosis, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

This paper introduces a novel spatiotemporal feature representation model designed to address the limitations of traditional methods in multidimensional time series (MTS) analysis. The proposed approach converts MTS into one-dimensional sequences of spatially evolving events, preserving the complex coupling relationships between dimensions. By employing a variable-length tuple mining method, key spatiotemporal features are extracted, enhancing the interpretability and accuracy of time series analysis. Unlike conventional models, this unsupervised method does not rely on large training datasets, making it adaptable across different domains. Experimental results from motion sequence classification validate the model's superior performance in capturing intricate patterns within the data. The proposed framework has significant potential for applications across various fields, including backend services for monitoring and optimizing IT infrastructure, medical diagnosis through continuous patient monitoring and health trend analysis, and internet businesses for tracking user behavior and forecasting sales. This work offers a new theoretical foundation and technical support for advancing time series data mining and its practical applications in human behavior recognition and other domains.
Evaluating the Quality of Code Comments Generated by Large Language Models for Novice Programmers
Authors: Aysa Xuemo Fan, Arun Balajiee Lekshmi Narayanan, Mohammad Hassany, Jiaze Ke
Date: 2024-09-22 00:00:00

Large Language Models (LLMs) show promise in generating code comments for novice programmers, but their educational effectiveness remains under-evaluated. This study assesses the instructional quality of code comments produced by GPT-4, GPT-3.5-Turbo, and Llama2, compared to expert-developed comments, focusing on their suitability for novices. Analyzing a dataset of ``easy'' level Java solutions from LeetCode, we find that GPT-4 exhibits comparable quality to expert comments in aspects critical for beginners, such as clarity, beginner-friendliness, concept elucidation, and step-by-step guidance. GPT-4 outperforms Llama2 in discussing complexity (chi-square = 11.40, p = 0.001) and is perceived as significantly more supportive for beginners than GPT-3.5 and Llama2 with Mann-Whitney U-statistics = 300.5 and 322.5, p = 0.0017 and 0.0003). This study highlights the potential of LLMs for generating code comments tailored to novice programmers.