pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Future of Artificial Intelligence in Agile Software Development
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00

The advent of Artificial intelligence has promising advantages that can be utilized to transform the landscape of software project development. The Software process framework consists of activities that constantly require routine human interaction, leading to the possibility of errors and uncertainties. AI can assist software development managers, software testers, and other team members by leveraging LLMs, GenAI models, and AI agents to perform routine tasks, risk analysis and prediction, strategy recommendations, and support decision making. AI has the potential to increase efficiency and reduce the risks encountered by the project management team while increasing the project success rates. Additionally, it can also break down complex notions and development processes for stakeholders to make informed decisions. In this paper, we propose an approach in which AI tools and technologies can be utilized to bestow maximum assistance for agile software projects, which have become increasingly favored in the industry in recent years.
Investigating Brain Connectivity and Regional Statistics from EEG for early stage Parkinson's Classification
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00

We evaluate the effectiveness of combining brain connectivity metrics with signal statistics for early stage Parkinson's Disease (PD) classification using electroencephalogram data (EEG). The data is from 5 arousal states - wakeful and four sleep stages (N1, N2, N3 and REM). Our pipeline uses an Ada Boost model for classification on a challenging early stage PD classification task with with only 30 participants (11 PD , 19 Healthy Control). Evaluating 9 brain connectivity metrics we find the best connectivity metric to be different for each arousal state with Phase Lag Index achieving the highest individual classification accuracy of 86\% on N1 data. Further to this our pipeline using regional signal statistics achieves an accuracy of 78\%, using brain connectivity only achieves an accuracy of 86\% whereas combining the two achieves a best accuracy of 91\%. This best performance is achieved on N1 data using Phase Lag Index (PLI) combined with statistics derived from the frequency characteristics of the EEG signal. This model also achieves a recall of 80 \% and precision of 96\%. Furthermore we find that on data from each arousal state, combining PLI with regional signal statistics improves classification accuracy versus using signal statistics or brain connectivity alone. Thus we conclude that combining brain connectivity statistics with regional EEG statistics is optimal for classifier performance on early stage Parkinson's. Additionally, we find outperformance of N1 EEG for classification of Parkinson's and expect this could be due to disrupted N1 sleep in PD. This should be explored in future work.
Pathway to Secure and Trustworthy ZSM for LLMs: Attacks, Defense, and Opportunities
Authors: Sunder Ali Khowaja, Parus Khuwaja, Kapal Dev, Hussam Al Hamadi, Engin Zeydan
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Inference Attack, Membership Inference Attack, named-entity-recognition, Named Entity Recognition

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been gaining a lot of interest due to their adaptability and extensibility in emerging applications, including communication networks. It is anticipated that ZSM networks will be able to support LLMs as a service, as they provide ultra reliable low-latency communications and closed loop massive connectivity. However, LLMs are vulnerable to data and model privacy issues that affect the trustworthiness of LLMs to be deployed for user-based services. In this paper, we explore the security vulnerabilities associated with fine-tuning LLMs in ZSM networks, in particular the membership inference attack. We define the characteristics of an attack network that can perform a membership inference attack if the attacker has access to the fine-tuned model for the downstream task. We show that the membership inference attacks are effective for any downstream task, which can lead to a personal data breach when using LLM as a service. The experimental results show that the attack success rate of maximum 92% can be achieved on named entity recognition task. Based on the experimental analysis, we discuss possible defense mechanisms and present possible research directions to make the LLMs more trustworthy in the context of ZSM networks.
Improving Retrieval-Augmented Generation in Medicine with Iterative Follow-up Questions
Authors: Guangzhi Xiong, Qiao Jin, Xiao Wang, Minjia Zhang, Zhiyong Lu, Aidong Zhang
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Medical Question Answering, MedQA, MMLU, Prompt Engineering, Question Answering, RAG, Retrieval, Retrieval-augmented Generation

The emergent abilities of large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated great potential in solving medical questions. They can possess considerable medical knowledge, but may still hallucinate and are inflexible in the knowledge updates. While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has been proposed to enhance the medical question-answering capabilities of LLMs with external knowledge bases, it may still fail in complex cases where multiple rounds of information-seeking are required. To address such an issue, we propose iterative RAG for medicine (i-MedRAG), where LLMs can iteratively ask follow-up queries based on previous information-seeking attempts. In each iteration of i-MedRAG, the follow-up queries will be answered by a conventional RAG system and they will be further used to guide the query generation in the next iteration. Our experiments show the improved performance of various LLMs brought by i-MedRAG compared with conventional RAG on complex questions from clinical vignettes in the United States Medical Licensing Examination (USMLE), as well as various knowledge tests in the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) dataset. Notably, our zero-shot i-MedRAG outperforms all existing prompt engineering and fine-tuning methods on GPT-3.5, achieving an accuracy of 69.68% on the MedQA dataset. In addition, we characterize the scaling properties of i-MedRAG with different iterations of follow-up queries and different numbers of queries per iteration. Our case studies show that i-MedRAG can flexibly ask follow-up queries to form reasoning chains, providing an in-depth analysis of medical questions. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first-of-its-kind study on incorporating follow-up queries into medical RAG. The implementation of i-MedRAG is available at https://github.com/Teddy-XiongGZ/MedRAG.
A deep learning-enabled smart garment for accurate and versatile sleep conditions monitoring in daily life
Authors: Chenyu Tang, Wentian Yi, Muzi Xu, Yuxuan Jin, Zibo Zhang, Xuhang Chen, Caizhi Liao, Peter Smielewski, Luigi G. Occhipinti
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Explainable artificial intelligence, Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI), Few-Shot Learning, Sleep Quality, Transfer Learning

In wearable smart systems, continuous monitoring and accurate classification of different sleep-related conditions are critical for enhancing sleep quality and preventing sleep-related chronic conditions. However, the requirements for device-skin coupling quality in electrophysiological sleep monitoring systems hinder the comfort and reliability of night wearing. Here, we report a washable, skin-compatible smart garment sleep monitoring system that captures local skin strain signals under weak device-skin coupling conditions without positioning or skin preparation requirements. A printed textile-based strain sensor array responds to strain from 0.1% to 10% with a gauge factor as high as 100 and shows independence to extrinsic motion artefacts via strain-isolating printed pattern design. Through reversible starching treatment, ink penetration depth during direct printing on garments is controlled to achieve batch-to-batch performance variation < 10%. Coupled with deep learning, explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), and transfer learning data processing, the smart garment is capable of classifying six sleep states with an accuracy of 98.6%, maintaining excellent explainability (classification with low bias) and generalization (95% accuracy on new users with few-shot learning less than 15 samples per class) in practical applications, paving the way for next-generation daily sleep healthcare management.
Segment anything model 2: an application to 2D and 3D medical images
Authors: Haoyu Dong, Hanxue Gu, Yaqian Chen, Jichen Yang, YuWen Chen, Maciej A. Mazurowski
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Computed Tomography (CT), Segmentation

Segment Anything Model (SAM) has gained significant attention because of its ability to segment various objects in images given a prompt. The recently developed SAM 2 has extended this ability to video inputs. This opens an opportunity to apply SAM to 3D images, one of the fundamental tasks in the medical imaging field. In this paper, we extensively evaluate SAM 2's ability to segment both 2D and 3D medical images by first collecting 21 medical imaging datasets, including surgical videos, common 3D modalities such as computed tomography (CT), magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), and positron emission tomography (PET) as well as 2D modalities such as X-ray and ultrasound. Two evaluation settings of SAM 2 are considered: (1) multi-frame 3D segmentation, where prompts are provided to one or multiple slice(s) selected from the volume, and (2) single-frame 2D segmentation, where prompts are provided to each slice. The former only applies to videos and 3D modalities, while the latter applies to all datasets. Our results show that SAM 2 exhibits similar performance as SAM under single-frame 2D segmentation, and has variable performance under multi-frame 3D segmentation depending on the choices of slices to annotate, the direction of the propagation, the predictions utilized during the propagation, etc. We believe our work enhances the understanding of SAM 2's behavior in the medical field and provides directions for future work in adapting SAM 2 to this domain. Our code is available at: https://github.com/mazurowski-lab/segment-anything2-medical-evaluation.
MM-Vet v2: A Challenging Benchmark to Evaluate Large Multimodal Models for Integrated Capabilities
Authors: Weihao Yu, Zhengyuan Yang, Lingfeng Ren, Linjie Li, JianFeng Wang, Kevin Lin, Chung-Ching Lin, Zicheng Liu, Lijuan Wang, Xinchao Wang
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Math, MM-Vet, MM-Vet v2, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Text Generation, Visual Question Answering

MM-Vet, with open-ended vision-language questions targeting at evaluating integrated capabilities, has become one of the most popular benchmarks for large multimodal model evaluation. MM-Vet assesses six core vision-language (VL) capabilities: recognition, knowledge, spatial awareness, language generation, OCR, and math. However, its question format is restricted to single image-text pairs, lacking the interleaved image and text sequences prevalent in real-world scenarios. To address this limitation, we introduce MM-Vet v2, which includes a new VL capability called "image-text sequence understanding", evaluating models' ability to process VL sequences. Furthermore, we maintain the high quality of evaluation samples while further expanding the evaluation set size. Using MM-Vet v2 to benchmark large multimodal models, we found that Claude 3.5 Sonnet is the best model with a score of 71.8, slightly outperforming GPT-4o which scored 71.0. Among open-weight models, InternVL2-Llama3-76B leads with a score of 68.4. The code, data, and leaderboard are accessible at https://github.com/yuweihao/MM-Vet.
Advancing Multimodal Data Fusion in Pain Recognition: A Strategy Leveraging Statistical Correlation and Human-Centered Perspectives
Date: 2024-03-30 00:00:00

This research presents a novel multimodal data fusion methodology for pain behavior recognition, integrating statistical correlation analysis with human-centered insights. Our approach introduces two key innovations: 1) integrating data-driven statistical relevance weights into the fusion strategy to effectively utilize complementary information from heterogeneous modalities, and 2) incorporating human-centric movement characteristics into multimodal representation learning for detailed modeling of pain behaviors. Validated across various deep learning architectures, our method demonstrates superior performance and broad applicability. We propose a customizable framework that aligns each modality with a suitable classifier based on statistical significance, advancing personalized and effective multimodal fusion. Furthermore, our methodology provides explainable analysis of multimodal data, contributing to interpretable and explainable AI in healthcare. By highlighting the importance of data diversity and modality-specific representations, we enhance traditional fusion techniques and set new standards for recognizing complex pain behaviors. Our findings have significant implications for promoting patient-centered healthcare interventions and supporting explainable clinical decision-making.
An AI-Enabled Framework Within Reach for Enhancing Healthcare Sustainability and Fairness
Date: 2024-04-21 00:00:00

Good health and well-being is among key issues in the United Nations 2030 Sustainable Development Goals. The rising prevalence of large-scale infectious diseases and the accelerated aging of the global population are driving the transformation of healthcare technologies. In this context, establishing large-scale public health datasets, developing medical models, and creating decision-making systems with a human-centric approach are of strategic significance. Recently, by leveraging the extraordinary number of accessible cameras, groundbreaking advancements have emerged in AI methods for physiological signal monitoring and disease diagnosis using camera sensors. These approaches, requiring no specialized medical equipment, offer convenient manners of collecting large-scale medical data in response to public health events. Therefore, we outline a prospective framework and heuristic vision for a camera-based public health (CBPH) framework utilizing visual physiological monitoring technology. The CBPH can be considered as a convenient and universal framework for public health, advancing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, particularly in promoting the universality, sustainability, and equity of healthcare in low- and middle-income countries or regions. Furthermore, CBPH provides a comprehensive solution for building a large-scale and human-centric medical database, and a multi-task large medical model for public health and medical scientific discoveries. It has a significant potential to revolutionize personal monitoring technologies, digital medicine, telemedicine, and primary health care in public health. Therefore, it can be deemed that the outcomes of this paper will contribute to the establishment of a sustainable and fair framework for public health, which serves as a crucial bridge for advancing scientific discoveries in the realm of AI for medicine (AI4Medicine).
CogNarr Ecosystem: Facilitating Group Cognition at Scale
Date: 2024-07-11 00:00:00

Human groups of all sizes and kinds engage in deliberation, problem solving, strategizing, decision making, and more generally, cognition. Some groups are large, and that setting presents unique challenges. The small-group setting often involves face-to-face dialogue, but group cognition in the large-group setting typically requires some form of online interaction. New approaches are needed to facilitate the kind of rich communication and information processing that are required for effective, functional cognition in the online setting, especially for groups characterized by thousands to millions of participants who wish to share potentially complex, nuanced, and dynamic perspectives. This concept paper proposes the CogNarr (Cognitive Narrative) ecosystem, which is designed to facilitate functional cognition in the large-group setting. The paper's contribution is a novel vision as to how recent developments in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, natural language processing, and related fields might be scaled and applied to large-group cognition, using an approach that itself promotes further scientific advancement. A key perspective is to view a group as an organism that uses some form of cognitive architecture to sense the world, process information, remember, learn, predict, make decisions, and adapt to changing conditions. The CogNarr ecosystem is designed to serve as a component within that architecture.
Modeling stochastic eye tracking data: A comparison of quantum generative adversarial networks and Markov models
Authors: Shailendra Bhandari, Pedro Lincastre, Pedro Lind
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series

We explore the use of quantum generative adversarial networks QGANs for modeling eye movement velocity data. We assess whether the advanced computational capabilities of QGANs can enhance the modeling of complex stochastic distribution beyond the traditional mathematical models, particularly the Markov model. The findings indicate that while QGANs demonstrate potential in approximating complex distributions, the Markov model consistently outperforms in accurately replicating the real data distribution. This comparison underlines the challenges and avenues for refinement in time series data generation using quantum computing techniques. It emphasizes the need for further optimization of quantum models to better align with real-world data characteristics.
Back to the Continuous Attractor
Authors: Ábel Ságodi, Guillermo Martín-Sánchez, Piotr Sokół, Il Memming Park
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00

Continuous attractors offer a unique class of solutions for storing continuous-valued variables in recurrent system states for indefinitely long time intervals. Unfortunately, continuous attractors suffer from severe structural instability in general--they are destroyed by most infinitesimal changes of the dynamical law that defines them. This fragility limits their utility especially in biological systems as their recurrent dynamics are subject to constant perturbations. We observe that the bifurcations from continuous attractors in theoretical neuroscience models display various structurally stable forms. Although their asymptotic behaviors to maintain memory are categorically distinct, their finite-time behaviors are similar. We build on the persistent manifold theory to explain the commonalities between bifurcations from and approximations of continuous attractors. Fast-slow decomposition analysis uncovers the persistent manifold that survives the seemingly destructive bifurcation. Moreover, recurrent neural networks trained on analog memory tasks display approximate continuous attractors with predicted slow manifold structures. Therefore, continuous attractors are functionally robust and remain useful as a universal analogy for understanding analog memory.
How quantum and evolutionary algorithms can help each other: two examples
Authors: Shailendra Bhandari, Stefano Nichele, Sergiy Denysov, Pedro G. Lind
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Artificial Life, Evolutionary Algorithms

We investigate the potential of bio-inspired evolutionary algorithms for designing quantum circuits with specific goals, focusing on two particular tasks. The first one is motivated by the ideas of Artificial Life that are used to reproduce stochastic cellular automata with given rules. We test the robustness of quantum implementations of the cellular automata for different numbers of quantum gates The second task deals with the sampling of quantum circuits that generate highly entangled quantum states, which constitute an important resource for quantum computing. In particular, an evolutionary algorithm is employed to optimize circuits with respect to a fitness function defined with the Mayer-Wallach entanglement measure. We demonstrate that, by balancing the mutation rate between exploration and exploitation, we can find entangling quantum circuits for up to five qubits. We also discuss the trade-off between the number of gates in quantum circuits and the computational costs of finding the gate arrangements leading to a strongly entangled state. Our findings provide additional insight into the trade-off between the complexity of a circuit and its performance, which is an important factor in the design of quantum circuits.
A Course Shared Task on Evaluating LLM Output for Clinical Questions
Authors: Yufang Hou, Thy Thy Tran, Doan Nam Long Vu, Yiwen Cao, Kai Li, Lukas Rohde, Iryna Gurevych
Date: 2024-07-31 00:00:00

This paper presents a shared task that we organized at the Foundations of Language Technology (FoLT) course in 2023/2024 at the Technical University of Darmstadt, which focuses on evaluating the output of Large Language Models (LLMs) in generating harmful answers to health-related clinical questions. We describe the task design considerations and report the feedback we received from the students. We expect the task and the findings reported in this paper to be relevant for instructors teaching natural language processing (NLP) and designing course assignments.
Sentence-wise Speech Summarization: Task, Datasets, and End-to-End Modeling with LM Knowledge Distillation
Authors: Kohei Matsuura, Takanori Ashihara, Takafumi Moriya, Masato Mimura, Takatomo Kano, Atsunori Ogawa, Marc Delcroix
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Knowledge Distillation, Sentence, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition, Text Summarization

This paper introduces a novel approach called sentence-wise speech summarization (Sen-SSum), which generates text summaries from a spoken document in a sentence-by-sentence manner. Sen-SSum combines the real-time processing of automatic speech recognition (ASR) with the conciseness of speech summarization. To explore this approach, we present two datasets for Sen-SSum: Mega-SSum and CSJ-SSum. Using these datasets, our study evaluates two types of Transformer-based models: 1) cascade models that combine ASR and strong text summarization models, and 2) end-to-end (E2E) models that directly convert speech into a text summary. While E2E models are appealing to develop compute-efficient models, they perform worse than cascade models. Therefore, we propose knowledge distillation for E2E models using pseudo-summaries generated by the cascade models. Our experiments show that this proposed knowledge distillation effectively improves the performance of the E2E model on both datasets.
Navigating Text-to-Image Generative Bias across Indic Languages
Authors: Surbhi Mittal, Arnav Sudan, Mayank Vatsa, Richa Singh, Tamar Glaser, Tal Hassner
Date: 2024-08-01 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity

This research investigates biases in text-to-image (TTI) models for the Indic languages widely spoken across India. It evaluates and compares the generative performance and cultural relevance of leading TTI models in these languages against their performance in English. Using the proposed IndicTTI benchmark, we comprehensively assess the performance of 30 Indic languages with two open-source diffusion models and two commercial generation APIs. The primary objective of this benchmark is to evaluate the support for Indic languages in these models and identify areas needing improvement. Given the linguistic diversity of 30 languages spoken by over 1.4 billion people, this benchmark aims to provide a detailed and insightful analysis of TTI models' effectiveness within the Indic linguistic landscape. The data and code for the IndicTTI benchmark can be accessed at https://iab-rubric.org/resources/other-databases/indictti.