pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
M3Bench: Benchmarking Whole-body Motion Generation for Mobile Manipulation in 3D Scenes
Authors: Zeyu Zhang, Sixu Yan, Muzhi Han, Zaijin Wang, Xinggang Wang, Song-Chun Zhu, Hangxin Liu
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Motion Generation, Object Rearrangement

We propose M3Bench, a new benchmark for whole-body motion generation in mobile manipulation tasks. Given a 3D scene context, M3Bench requires an embodied agent to reason about its configuration, environmental constraints, and task objectives to generate coordinated whole-body motion trajectories for object rearrangement. M3Bench features 30,000 object rearrangement tasks across 119 diverse scenes, providing expert demonstrations generated by our newly developed M3BenchMaker, an automatic data generation tool that produces whole-body motion trajectories from high-level task instructions using only basic scene and robot information. Our benchmark includes various task splits to evaluate generalization across different dimensions and leverages realistic physics simulation for trajectory assessment. Extensive evaluation analysis reveals that state-of-the-art models struggle with coordinating base-arm motion while adhering to environmental and task-specific constraints, underscoring the need for new models to bridge this gap. By releasing M3Bench and M3BenchMaker we aim to advance robotics research toward more adaptive and capable mobile manipulation in diverse, real-world environments.
Large Language Models as Code Executors: An Exploratory Study
Authors: Chenyang Lyu, Lecheng Yan, Rui Xing, Wenxi Li, Younes Samih, Tianbo Ji, Longyue Wang
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00

The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly evolved, extending from natural language processing to complex tasks like code understanding and generation. We expand the scope of LLMs' capabilities to a broader context, using LLMs to execute code snippets to obtain the output. This paper pioneers the exploration of LLMs as code executors, where code snippets are directly fed to the models for execution, and outputs are returned. We are the first to comprehensively examine this feasibility across various LLMs, including OpenAI's o1, GPT-4o, GPT-3.5, DeepSeek, and Qwen-Coder. Notably, the o1 model achieved over 90% accuracy in code execution, while others demonstrated lower accuracy levels. Furthermore, we introduce an Iterative Instruction Prompting (IIP) technique that processes code snippets line by line, enhancing the accuracy of weaker models by an average of 7.22% (with the highest improvement of 18.96%) and an absolute average improvement of 3.86% against CoT prompting (with the highest improvement of 19.46%). Our study not only highlights the transformative potential of LLMs in coding but also lays the groundwork for future advancements in automated programming and the completion of complex tasks.
Revisiting Multi-Permutation Equivariance through the Lens of Irreducible Representations
Authors: Yonatan Sverdlov, Ido Springer, Nadav Dym
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Graph Anomaly Detection, LEMMA

This paper explores the characterization of equivariant linear layers for representations of permutations and related groups. Unlike traditional approaches, which address these problems using parameter-sharing, we consider an alternative methodology based on irreducible representations and Schur's lemma. Using this methodology, we obtain an alternative derivation for existing models like DeepSets, 2-IGN graph equivariant networks, and Deep Weight Space (DWS) networks. The derivation for DWS networks is significantly simpler than that of previous results. Next, we extend our approach to unaligned symmetric sets, where equivariance to the wreath product of groups is required. Previous works have addressed this problem in a rather restrictive setting, in which almost all wreath equivariant layers are Siamese. In contrast, we give a full characterization of layers in this case and show that there is a vast number of additional non-Siamese layers in some settings. We also show empirically that these additional non-Siamese layers can improve performance in tasks like graph anomaly detection, weight space alignment, and learning Wasserstein distances. Our code is available at \href{https://github.com/yonatansverdlov/Irreducible-Representations-of-Deep-Weight-Spaces}{GitHub}.
Decouple-Then-Merge: Towards Better Training for Diffusion Models
Authors: Qianli Ma, Xuefei Ning, Dongrui Liu, Li Niu, Linfeng Zhang
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Denoising, Image Generation

Diffusion models are trained by learning a sequence of models that reverse each step of noise corruption. Typically, the model parameters are fully shared across multiple timesteps to enhance training efficiency. However, since the denoising tasks differ at each timestep, the gradients computed at different timesteps may conflict, potentially degrading the overall performance of image generation. To solve this issue, this work proposes a Decouple-then-Merge (DeMe) framework, which begins with a pretrained model and finetunes separate models tailored to specific timesteps. We introduce several improved techniques during the finetuning stage to promote effective knowledge sharing while minimizing training interference across timesteps. Finally, after finetuning, these separate models can be merged into a single model in the parameter space, ensuring efficient and practical inference. Experimental results show significant generation quality improvements upon 6 benchmarks including Stable Diffusion on COCO30K, ImageNet1K, PartiPrompts, and DDPM on LSUN Church, LSUN Bedroom, and CIFAR10.
Task-oriented Time Series Imputation Evaluation via Generalized Representers
Authors: Zhixian Wang, Linxiao Yang, Liang Sun, Qingsong Wen, Yi Wang
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Imputation, Missing Values, Time Series, Time Series Analysis

Time series analysis is widely used in many fields such as power energy, economics, and transportation, including different tasks such as forecasting, anomaly detection, classification, etc. Missing values are widely observed in these tasks, and often leading to unpredictable negative effects on existing methods, hindering their further application. In response to this situation, existing time series imputation methods mainly focus on restoring sequences based on their data characteristics, while ignoring the performance of the restored sequences in downstream tasks. Considering different requirements of downstream tasks (e.g., forecasting), this paper proposes an efficient downstream task-oriented time series imputation evaluation approach. By combining time series imputation with neural network models used for downstream tasks, the gain of different imputation strategies on downstream tasks is estimated without retraining, and the most favorable imputation value for downstream tasks is given by combining different imputation strategies according to the estimated gain.
Toward Physics-guided Time Series Embedding
Authors: Jiaxi Hu, BoWen Zhang, Qingsong Wen, Fugee Tsung, Yuxuan Liang
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Analysis

In various scientific and engineering fields, the primary research areas have revolved around physics-based dynamical systems modeling and data-driven time series analysis. According to the embedding theory, dynamical systems and time series can be mutually transformed using observation functions and physical reconstruction techniques. Based on this, we propose Embedding Duality Theory, where the parameterized embedding layer essentially provides a linear estimation of the non-linear time series dynamics. This theory enables us to bypass the parameterized embedding layer and directly employ physical reconstruction techniques to acquire a data embedding representation. Utilizing physical priors results in a 10X reduction in parameters, a 3X increase in speed, and maximum performance boosts of 18% in expert, 22% in few-shot, and 53\% in zero-shot tasks without any hyper-parameter tuning. All methods are encapsulated as a plug-and-play module
Subtle Errors Matter: Preference Learning via Error-injected Self-editing
Authors: Kaishuai Xu, Tiezheng Yu, Wenjun Hou, Yi Cheng, Chak Tou Leong, Liangyou Li, Xin Jiang, Lifeng Shang, Qun Liu, Wenjie Li
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K, Math, Mathematical Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) have exhibited strong mathematical reasoning and computational prowess, tackling tasks ranging from basic arithmetic to advanced competition-level problems. However, frequently occurring subtle errors, such as miscalculations or incorrect substitutions, limit the models' full mathematical potential. Existing studies to improve mathematical ability typically involve distilling reasoning skills from stronger LLMs or applying preference learning to step-wise response pairs. Although these methods leverage samples of varying granularity to mitigate reasoning errors, they overlook the frequently occurring subtle errors. A major reason is that sampled preference pairs involve differences unrelated to the errors, which may distract the model from focusing on subtle errors. In this work, we propose a novel preference learning framework called eRror-Injected Self-Editing (RISE), which injects predefined subtle errors into partial tokens of correct solutions to construct hard pairs for error mitigation. In detail, RISE uses the model itself to edit a small number of tokens in the solution, injecting designed subtle errors. Then, pairs composed of self-edited solutions and their corresponding correct ones, along with pairs of correct and incorrect solutions obtained through sampling, are used together for subtle error-aware DPO training. Compared with other preference learning methods, RISE further refines the training objective to focus on predefined errors and their tokens, without requiring fine-grained sampling or preference annotation. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of RISE, with preference learning on Qwen2-7B-Instruct yielding notable improvements of 3.0% on GSM8K and 7.9% on MATH.
Effective Exploration Based on the Structural Information Principles
Authors: Xianghua Zeng, Hao Peng, Angsheng Li
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning

Traditional information theory provides a valuable foundation for Reinforcement Learning, particularly through representation learning and entropy maximization for agent exploration. However, existing methods primarily concentrate on modeling the uncertainty associated with RL's random variables, neglecting the inherent structure within the state and action spaces. In this paper, we propose a novel Structural Information principles-based Effective Exploration framework, namely SI2E. Structural mutual information between two variables is defined to address the single-variable limitation in structural information, and an innovative embedding principle is presented to capture dynamics-relevant state-action representations. The SI2E analyzes value differences in the agent's policy between state-action pairs and minimizes structural entropy to derive the hierarchical state-action structure, referred to as the encoding tree. Under this tree structure, value-conditional structural entropy is defined and maximized to design an intrinsic reward mechanism that avoids redundant transitions and promotes enhanced coverage in the state-action space. Theoretical connections are established between SI2E and classical information-theoretic methodologies, highlighting our framework's rationality and advantage. Comprehensive evaluations in the MiniGrid, MetaWorld, and DeepMind Control Suite benchmarks demonstrate that SI2E significantly outperforms state-of-the-art exploration baselines regarding final performance and sample efficiency, with maximum improvements of 37.63% and 60.25%, respectively.
Learning Evolving Tools for Large Language Models
Authors: Guoxin Chen, Zhong Zhang, Xin Cong, Fangda Guo, Yesai Wu, Yankai Lin, Wenzheng Feng, Yasheng Wang
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00

Tool learning enables large language models (LLMs) to interact with external tools and APIs, greatly expanding the application scope of LLMs. However, due to the dynamic nature of external environments, these tools and APIs may become outdated over time, preventing LLMs from correctly invoking tools. Existing research primarily focuses on static environments and overlooks this issue, limiting the adaptability of LLMs in real-world applications. In this paper, we propose ToolEVO, a novel framework designed to enhance the adaptive and reflective capabilities of LLMs against tool variability. By leveraging Monte Carlo Tree Search, ToolEVO facilitates active exploration and interaction of LLMs within dynamic environments, allowing for autonomous self-reflection and self-updating of tool usage based on environmental feedback. Additionally, we introduce ToolQA-D, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the impact of tool variability. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness and stability of our approach, highlighting the importance of adaptability to tool variability for effective tool learning. Code: \url{https://github.com/Chen-GX/ToolEVO}
Pair-VPR: Place-Aware Pre-training and Contrastive Pair Classification for Visual Place Recognition with Vision Transformers
Authors: Stephen Hausler, Peyman Moghadam
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder, Re-Ranking, Visual Place Recognition

In this work we propose a novel joint training method for Visual Place Recognition (VPR), which simultaneously learns a global descriptor and a pair classifier for re-ranking. The pair classifier can predict whether a given pair of images are from the same place or not. The network only comprises Vision Transformer components for both the encoder and the pair classifier, and both components are trained using their respective class tokens. In existing VPR methods, typically the network is initialized using pre-trained weights from a generic image dataset such as ImageNet. In this work we propose an alternative pre-training strategy, by using Siamese Masked Image Modelling as a pre-training task. We propose a Place-aware image sampling procedure from a collection of large VPR datasets for pre-training our model, to learn visual features tuned specifically for VPR. By re-using the Mask Image Modelling encoder and decoder weights in the second stage of training, Pair-VPR can achieve state-of-the-art VPR performance across five benchmark datasets with a ViT-B encoder, along with further improvements in localization recall with larger encoders. The Pair-VPR website is: https://csiro-robotics.github.io/Pair-VPR.
Bahasa Harmony: A Comprehensive Dataset for Bahasa Text-to-Speech Synthesis with Discrete Codec Modeling of EnGen-TTS
Authors: Onkar Kishor Susladkar, Vishesh Tripathi, Biddwan Ahmed
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Speech Synthesis, text-to-speech, Text to Speech, Text-To-Speech Synthesis

This research introduces a comprehensive Bahasa text-to-speech (TTS) dataset and a novel TTS model, EnGen-TTS, designed to enhance the quality and versatility of synthetic speech in the Bahasa language. The dataset, spanning \textasciitilde55.0 hours and 52K audio recordings, integrates diverse textual sources, ensuring linguistic richness. A meticulous recording setup captures the nuances of Bahasa phonetics, employing professional equipment to ensure high-fidelity audio samples. Statistical analysis reveals the dataset's scale and diversity, laying the foundation for model training and evaluation. The proposed EnGen-TTS model performs better than established baselines, achieving a Mean Opinion Score (MOS) of 4.45 $\pm$ 0.13. Additionally, our investigation on real-time factor and model size highlights EnGen-TTS as a compelling choice, with efficient performance. This research marks a significant advancement in Bahasa TTS technology, with implications for diverse language applications. Link to Generated Samples: \url{https://bahasa-harmony-comp.vercel.app/}
Measuring Diversity of Game Scenarios
Authors: Yuchen Li, Ziqi Wang, Qingquan Zhang, Bo Yuan, Jialin Liu
Date: 2024-04-15 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Game Design, Survey

This survey comprehensively reviews the multi-dimensionality of game scenario diversity, spotlighting the innovative use of procedural content generation and other fields as cornerstones for enriching player experiences through diverse game scenarios. By traversing a wide array of disciplines, from affective modeling and multi-agent systems to psychological studies, our research underscores the importance of diverse game scenarios in gameplay and education. Through a taxonomy of diversity metrics and evaluation methods, we aim to bridge the current gaps in literature and practice, offering insights into effective strategies for measuring and integrating diversity in game scenarios. Our analysis highlights the necessity for a unified taxonomy to aid developers and researchers in crafting more engaging and varied game worlds. This survey not only charts a path for future research in diverse game scenarios but also serves as a handbook for industry practitioners seeking to leverage diversity as a key component of game design and development.
Efficient and Robust Knowledge Distillation from A Stronger Teacher Based on Correlation Matching
Authors: Wenqi Niu, Yingchao Wang, Guohui Cai, Hanpo Hou
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Knowledge Distillation, Neural Network Compression

Knowledge Distillation (KD) has emerged as a pivotal technique for neural network compression and performance enhancement. Most KD methods aim to transfer dark knowledge from a cumbersome teacher model to a lightweight student model based on Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence loss. However, the student performance improvements achieved through KD exhibit diminishing marginal returns, where a stronger teacher model does not necessarily lead to a proportionally stronger student model. To address this issue, we empirically find that the KL-based KD method may implicitly change the inter-class relationships learned by the student model, resulting in a more complex and ambiguous decision boundary, which in turn reduces the model's accuracy and generalization ability. Therefore, this study argues that the student model should learn not only the probability values from the teacher's output but also the relative ranking of classes, and proposes a novel Correlation Matching Knowledge Distillation (CMKD) method that combines the Pearson and Spearman correlation coefficients-based KD loss to achieve more efficient and robust distillation from a stronger teacher model. Moreover, considering that samples vary in difficulty, CMKD dynamically adjusts the weights of the Pearson-based loss and Spearman-based loss. CMKD is simple yet practical, and extensive experiments demonstrate that it can consistently achieve state-of-the-art performance on CIRAR-100 and ImageNet, and adapts well to various teacher architectures, sizes, and other KD methods.
Mitigating Time Discretization Challenges with WeatherODE: A Sandwich Physics-Driven Neural ODE for Weather Forecasting
Authors: Peiyuan Liu, Tian Zhou, Liang Sun, Rong Jin
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Weather Forecasting

In the field of weather forecasting, traditional models often grapple with discretization errors and time-dependent source discrepancies, which limit their predictive performance. In this paper, we present WeatherODE, a novel one-stage, physics-driven ordinary differential equation (ODE) model designed to enhance weather forecasting accuracy. By leveraging wave equation theory and integrating a time-dependent source model, WeatherODE effectively addresses the challenges associated with time-discretization error and dynamic atmospheric processes. Moreover, we design a CNN-ViT-CNN sandwich structure, facilitating efficient learning dynamics tailored for distinct yet interrelated tasks with varying optimization biases in advection equation estimation. Through rigorous experiments, WeatherODE demonstrates superior performance in both global and regional weather forecasting tasks, outperforming recent state-of-the-art approaches by significant margins of over 40.0\% and 31.8\% in root mean square error (RMSE), respectively. The source code is available at \url{https://github.com/DAMO-DI-ML/WeatherODE}.
The Accuracy Paradox in RLHF: When Better Reward Models Don't Yield Better Language Models
Authors: Yanjun Chen, Dawei Zhu, Yirong Sun, Xinghao Chen, Wei zhang, Xiaoyu Shen
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback significantly enhances Natural Language Processing by aligning language models with human expectations. A critical factor in this alignment is the strength of reward models used during training. This study explores whether stronger reward models invariably lead to better language models. In this paper, through experiments on relevance, factuality, and completeness tasks using the QA-FEEDBACK dataset and reward models based on Longformer, we uncover a surprising paradox: language models trained with moderately accurate reward models outperform those guided by highly accurate ones. This challenges the widely held belief that stronger reward models always lead to better language models, and opens up new avenues for future research into the key factors driving model performance and how to choose the most suitable reward models. Code and additional details are available at https://github.com/EIT-NLP/AccuracyParadox-RLHF.
InstantIR: Blind Image Restoration with Instant Generative Reference
Authors: Jen-Yuan Huang, Haofan Wang, Qixun Wang, Xu Bai, Hao Ai, Peng Xing, Jen-tse Huang
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Restoration

Handling test-time unknown degradation is the major challenge in Blind Image Restoration (BIR), necessitating high model generalization. An effective strategy is to incorporate prior knowledge, either from human input or generative model. In this paper, we introduce Instant-reference Image Restoration (InstantIR), a novel diffusion-based BIR method which dynamically adjusts generation condition during inference. We first extract a compact representation of the input via a pre-trained vision encoder. At each generation step, this representation is used to decode current diffusion latent and instantiate it in the generative prior. The degraded image is then encoded with this reference, providing robust generation condition. We observe the variance of generative references fluctuate with degradation intensity, which we further leverage as an indicator for developing a sampling algorithm adaptive to input quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate InstantIR achieves state-of-the-art performance and offering outstanding visual quality. Through modulating generative references with textual description, InstantIR can restore extreme degradation and additionally feature creative restoration.
Investigating Cost-Efficiency of LLM-Generated Training Data for Conversational Semantic Frame Analysis
Authors: Shiho Matta, Yin Jou Huang, Fei Cheng, Hirokazu Kiyomaru, Yugo Murawaki
Date: 2024-10-09 00:00:00
Tasks: Few-Shot Learning

Recent studies have demonstrated that few-shot learning allows LLMs to generate training data for supervised models at a low cost. However, the quality of LLM-generated data may not entirely match that of human-labeled data. This raises a crucial question: how should one balance the trade-off between the higher quality but more expensive human data and the lower quality yet substantially cheaper LLM-generated data? In this paper, we synthesized training data for conversational semantic frame analysis using GPT-4 and examined how to allocate budgets optimally to achieve the best performance. Our experiments, conducted across various budget levels, reveal that optimal cost-efficiency is achieved by combining both human and LLM-generated data across a wide range of budget levels. Notably, as the budget decreases, a higher proportion of LLM-generated data becomes more preferable.