pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents for Strategic Production Policies in Microeconomic Market Simulations
Authors: Eduardo C. Garrido-Merchán, Maria Coronado-Vaca, Álvaro López-López, Carlos Martinez de Ibarreta
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning

Traditional economic models often rely on fixed assumptions about market dynamics, limiting their ability to capture the complexities and stochastic nature of real-world scenarios. However, reality is more complex and includes noise, making traditional models assumptions not met in the market. In this paper, we explore the application of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) to obtain optimal production strategies in microeconomic market environments to overcome the limitations of traditional models. Concretely, we propose a DRL-based approach to obtain an effective policy in competitive markets with multiple producers, each optimizing their production decisions in response to fluctuating demand, supply, prices, subsidies, fixed costs, total production curve, elasticities and other effects contaminated by noise. Our framework enables agents to learn adaptive production policies to several simulations that consistently outperform static and random strategies. As the deep neural networks used by the agents are universal approximators of functions, DRL algorithms can represent in the network complex patterns of data learnt by trial and error that explain the market. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate how DRL can capture the intricate interplay between production costs, market prices, and competitor behavior, providing insights into optimal decision-making in dynamic economic settings. The results show that agents trained with DRL can strategically adjust production levels to maximize long-term profitability, even in the face of volatile market conditions. We believe that the study bridges the gap between theoretical economic modeling and practical market simulation, illustrating the potential of DRL to revolutionize decision-making in market strategies.
Malinowski in the Age of AI: Can large language models create a text game based on an anthropological classic?
Authors: Michael Peter Hoffmann, Jan Fillies, Adrian Paschke
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Misinformation, text-based games

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and GPT-4 have shown remarkable abilities in a wide range of tasks such as summarizing texts and assisting in coding. Scientific research has demonstrated that these models can also play text-adventure games. This study aims to explore whether LLMs can autonomously create text-based games based on anthropological classics, evaluating also their effectiveness in communicating knowledge. To achieve this, the study engaged anthropologists in discussions to gather their expectations and design inputs for an anthropologically themed game. Through iterative processes following the established HCI principle of 'design thinking', the prompts and the conceptual framework for crafting these games were refined. Leveraging GPT3.5, the study created three prototypes of games centered around the seminal anthropological work of the social anthropologist's Bronislaw Malinowski's "Argonauts of the Western Pacific" (1922). Subsequently, evaluations were conducted by inviting senior anthropologists to playtest these games, and based on their inputs, the game designs were refined. The tests revealed promising outcomes but also highlighted key challenges: the models encountered difficulties in providing in-depth thematic understandings, showed suspectibility to misinformation, tended towards monotonic responses after an extended period of play, and struggled to offer detailed biographical information. Despite these limitations, the study's findings open up new research avenues at the crossroads of artificial intelligence, machine learning, LLMs, ethnography, anthropology and human-computer interaction.
Asynchronous Perception Machine For Efficient Test-Time-Training
Authors: Rajat Modi, Yogesh Singh Rawat
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00

In this work, we propose Asynchronous Perception Machine (APM), a computationally-efficient architecture for test-time-training (TTT). APM can process patches of an image one at a time in any order asymmetrically and still encode semantic-awareness in the net. We demonstrate APM's ability to recognize out-of-distribution images without dataset-specific pre-training, augmentation or any-pretext task. APM offers competitive performance over existing TTT approaches. To perform TTT, APM just distills test sample's representation once. APM possesses a unique property: it can learn using just this single representation and starts predicting semantically-aware features. APM demostrates potential applications beyond test-time-training: APM can scale up to a dataset of 2D images and yield semantic-clusterings in a single forward pass. APM also provides first empirical evidence towards validating GLOM's insight, i.e. input percept is a field. Therefore, APM helps us converge towards an implementation which can do both interpolation and perception on a shared-connectionist hardware. Our code is publicly available at this link: https://rajatmodi62.github.io/apm_project_page/.
CodeRosetta: Pushing the Boundaries of Unsupervised Code Translation for Parallel Programming
Authors: Ali TehraniJamsaz, Arijit Bhattacharjee, Le Chen, Nesreen K. Ahmed, Amir Yazdanbakhsh, Ali Jannesari
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Code Translation, Decoder, Translation

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have renewed interest in automatic programming language translation. Encoder-decoder transformer models, in particular, have shown promise in translating between different programming languages. However, translating between a language and its high-performance computing (HPC) extensions remains underexplored due to challenges such as complex parallel semantics. In this paper, we introduce CodeRosetta, an encoder-decoder transformer model designed specifically for translating between programming languages and their HPC extensions. CodeRosetta is evaluated on C++ to CUDA and Fortran to C++ translation tasks. It uses a customized learning framework with tailored pretraining and training objectives to effectively capture both code semantics and parallel structural nuances, enabling bidirectional translation. Our results show that CodeRosetta outperforms state-of-the-art baselines in C++ to CUDA translation by 2.9 BLEU and 1.72 CodeBLEU points while improving compilation accuracy by 6.05%. Compared to general closed-source LLMs, our method improves C++ to CUDA translation by 22.08 BLEU and 14.39 CodeBLEU, with 2.75% higher compilation accuracy. Finally, CodeRosetta exhibits proficiency in Fortran to parallel C++ translation, marking it, to our knowledge, as the first encoder-decoder model for this complex task, improving CodeBLEU by at least 4.63 points compared to closed-source and open-code LLMs.
Props for Machine-Learning Security
Authors: Ari Juels, Farinaz Koushanfar
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Privacy Preserving

We propose protected pipelines or props for short, a new approach for authenticated, privacy-preserving access to deep-web data for machine learning (ML). By permitting secure use of vast sources of deep-web data, props address the systemic bottleneck of limited high-quality training data in ML development. Props also enable privacy-preserving and trustworthy forms of inference, allowing for safe use of sensitive data in ML applications. Props are practically realizable today by leveraging privacy-preserving oracle systems initially developed for blockchain applications.
MidiTok Visualizer: a tool for visualization and analysis of tokenized MIDI symbolic music
Authors: Michał Wiszenko, Kacper Stefański, Piotr Malesa, Łukasz Pokorzyński, Mateusz Modrzejewski
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00

Symbolic music research plays a crucial role in music-related machine learning, but MIDI data can be complex for those without musical expertise. To address this issue, we present MidiTok Visualizer, a web application designed to facilitate the exploration and visualization of various MIDI tokenization methods from the MidiTok Python package. MidiTok Visualizer offers numerous customizable parameters, enabling users to upload MIDI files to visualize tokenized data alongside an interactive piano roll.
Symbotunes: unified hub for symbolic music generative models
Authors: Paweł Skierś, Maksymilian Łazarski, Michał Kopeć, Mateusz Modrzejewski
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation

Implementations of popular symbolic music generative models often differ significantly in terms of the libraries utilized and overall project structure. Therefore, directly comparing the methods or becoming acquainted with them may present challenges. To mitigate this issue we introduce Symbotunes, an open-source unified hub for symbolic music generative models. Symbotunes contains modern Python implementations of well-known methods for symbolic music generation, as well as a unified pipeline for generating and training.
$\textit{Who Speaks Matters}$: Analysing the Influence of the Speaker's Ethnicity on Hate Classification
Authors: Ananya Malik, Kartik Sharma, Lynnette Hui Xian Ng, Shaily Bhatt
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Hate Speech Detection

Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a lucrative promise for scalable content moderation, including hate speech detection. However, they are also known to be brittle and biased against marginalised communities and dialects. This requires their applications to high-stakes tasks like hate speech detection to be critically scrutinized. In this work, we investigate the robustness of hate speech classification using LLMs, particularly when explicit and implicit markers of the speaker's ethnicity are injected into the input. For the explicit markers, we inject a phrase that mentions the speaker's identity. For the implicit markers, we inject dialectal features. By analysing how frequently model outputs flip in the presence of these markers, we reveal varying degrees of brittleness across 4 popular LLMs and 5 ethnicities. We find that the presence of implicit dialect markers in inputs causes model outputs to flip more than the presence of explicit markers. Further, the percentage of flips varies across ethnicities. Finally, we find that larger models are more robust. Our findings indicate the need for exercising caution in deploying LLMs for high-stakes tasks like hate speech detection.
Efficient Diversity-based Experience Replay for Deep Reinforcement Learning
Authors: Kaiyan Zhao, Yiming Wang, Yuyang Chen, Yan Li, Leong Hou U, Xiaoguang Niu
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Atari Games, Decision Making, Deep Reinforcement Learning, Diversity, MuJoCo, reinforcement-learning, Reinforcement Learning

Experience replay is widely used to improve learning efficiency in reinforcement learning by leveraging past experiences. However, existing experience replay methods, whether based on uniform or prioritized sampling, often suffer from low efficiency, particularly in real-world scenarios with high-dimensional state spaces. To address this limitation, we propose a novel approach, Efficient Diversity-based Experience Replay (EDER). EDER employs a determinantal point process to model the diversity between samples and prioritizes replay based on the diversity between samples. To further enhance learning efficiency, we incorporate Cholesky decomposition for handling large state spaces in realistic environments. Additionally, rejection sampling is applied to select samples with higher diversity, thereby improving overall learning efficacy. Extensive experiments are conducted on robotic manipulation tasks in MuJoCo, Atari games, and realistic indoor environments in Habitat. The results demonstrate that our approach not only significantly improves learning efficiency but also achieves superior performance in high-dimensional, realistic environments.
Improving Decision Sparsity
Authors: Yiyang Sun, Tong Wang, Cynthia Rudin
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Decision Making

Sparsity is a central aspect of interpretability in machine learning. Typically, sparsity is measured in terms of the size of a model globally, such as the number of variables it uses. However, this notion of sparsity is not particularly relevant for decision-making; someone subjected to a decision does not care about variables that do not contribute to the decision. In this work, we dramatically expand a notion of decision sparsity called the Sparse Explanation Value(SEV) so that its explanations are more meaningful. SEV considers movement along a hypercube towards a reference point. By allowing flexibility in that reference and by considering how distances along the hypercube translate to distances in feature space, we can derive sparser and more meaningful explanations for various types of function classes. We present cluster-based SEV and its variant tree-based SEV, introduce a method that improves credibility of explanations, and propose algorithms that optimize decision sparsity in machine learning models.
What Factors Affect Multi-Modal In-Context Learning? An In-Depth Exploration
Authors: Libo Qin, Qiguang Chen, Hao Fei, Zhi Chen, Min Li, Wanxiang Che
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: In-Context Learning, Retrieval

Recently, rapid advancements in Multi-Modal In-Context Learning (MM-ICL) have achieved notable success, which is capable of achieving superior performance across various tasks without requiring additional parameter tuning. However, the underlying rules for the effectiveness of MM-ICL remain under-explored. To fill this gap, this work aims to investigate the research question: "What factors affect the performance of MM-ICL?'' To this end, we investigate extensive experiments on the three core steps of MM-ICL including demonstration retrieval, demonstration ordering, and prompt construction using 6 vision large language models and 20 strategies. Our findings highlight (1) the necessity of a multi-modal retriever for demonstration retrieval, (2) the importance of intra-demonstration ordering over inter-demonstration ordering, and (3) the enhancement of task comprehension through introductory instructions in prompts. We hope this study can serve as a foundational guide for optimizing MM-ICL strategies in future research.
MusicFlow: Cascaded Flow Matching for Text Guided Music Generation
Authors: K R Prajwal, Bowen Shi, Matthew Lee, Apoorv Vyas, Andros Tjandra, Mahi Luthra, Baishan Guo, Huiyu Wang, Triantafyllos Afouras, David Kant, Wei-Ning Hsu
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Music Generation, Text-to-Music Generation

We introduce MusicFlow, a cascaded text-to-music generation model based on flow matching. Based on self-supervised representations to bridge between text descriptions and music audios, we construct two flow matching networks to model the conditional distribution of semantic and acoustic features. Additionally, we leverage masked prediction as the training objective, enabling the model to generalize to other tasks such as music infilling and continuation in a zero-shot manner. Experiments on MusicCaps reveal that the music generated by MusicFlow exhibits superior quality and text coherence despite being over $2\sim5$ times smaller and requiring $5$ times fewer iterative steps. Simultaneously, the model can perform other music generation tasks and achieves competitive performance in music infilling and continuation. Our code and model will be publicly available.
A Derivational ChainBank for Modern Standard Arabic
Authors: Reham Marzouk, Sondos Krouna, Nizar Habash
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: LEMMA

We introduce the new concept of an Arabic Derivational Chain Bank CHAINBANK to leverage the relationship between form and meaning in modeling Arabic derivational morphology. We constructed a knowledge graph network of abstract patterns and their derivational relations and aligned it with the lemmas of the CAMELMORPH morphological analyzer database. This process produced chains of derived words' lemmas linked to their corresponding lemma bases through derivational relations, encompassing 23,333 derivational connections.
TrajAgent: An Agent Framework for Unified Trajectory Modelling
Authors: Yuwei Du, Jie Feng, Jie Zhao, Yong Li
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Future prediction, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Trajectory Modeling

Trajectory modeling, which includes research on trajectory data pattern mining and future prediction, has widespread applications in areas such as life services, urban transportation, and public administration. Numerous methods have been proposed to address specific problems within trajectory modelling. However, due to the heterogeneity of data and the diversity of trajectory tasks, achieving unified trajectory modelling remains an important yet challenging task. In this paper, we propose TrajAgent, a large language model-based agentic framework, to unify various trajectory modelling tasks. In TrajAgent, we first develop UniEnv, an execution environment with a unified data and model interface, to support the execution and training of various models. Building on UniEnv, we introduce TAgent, an agentic workflow designed for automatic trajectory modelling across various trajectory tasks. Specifically, we design AutOpt, a systematic optimization module within TAgent, to further improve the performance of the integrated model. With diverse trajectory tasks input in natural language, TrajAgent automatically generates competitive results via training and executing appropriate models. Extensive experiments on four tasks using four real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of TrajAgent in unified trajectory modelling, achieving an average performance improvement of 15.43% over baseline methods.
TEAFormers: TEnsor-Augmented Transformers for Multi-Dimensional Time Series Forecasting
Authors: Linghang Kong, Elynn Chen, Yuzhou Chen, Yuefeng Han
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Time Series, Time Series Forecasting

Multi-dimensional time series data, such as matrix and tensor-variate time series, are increasingly prevalent in fields such as economics, finance, and climate science. Traditional Transformer models, though adept with sequential data, do not effectively preserve these multi-dimensional structures, as their internal operations in effect flatten multi-dimensional observations into vectors, thereby losing critical multi-dimensional relationships and patterns. To address this, we introduce the Tensor-Augmented Transformer (TEAFormer), a novel method that incorporates tensor expansion and compression within the Transformer framework to maintain and leverage the inherent multi-dimensional structures, thus reducing computational costs and improving prediction accuracy. The core feature of the TEAFormer, the Tensor-Augmentation (TEA) module, utilizes tensor expansion to enhance multi-view feature learning and tensor compression for efficient information aggregation and reduced computational load. The TEA module is not just a specific model architecture but a versatile component that is highly compatible with the attention mechanism and the encoder-decoder structure of Transformers, making it adaptable to existing Transformer architectures. Our comprehensive experiments, which integrate the TEA module into three popular time series Transformer models across three real-world benchmarks, show significant performance enhancements, highlighting the potential of TEAFormers for cutting-edge time series forecasting.
MedGo: A Chinese Medical Large Language Model
Authors: HaiTao Zhang, Bo An
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model, Medical Question Answering, model, Question Answering

Large models are a hot research topic in the field of artificial intelligence. Leveraging their generative capabilities has the potential to enhance the level and quality of medical services. In response to the limitations of current large language models, which often struggle with accuracy and have narrow capabilities in medical applications, this paper presents a Chinese medical large language model, MedGo. MedGo was trained using a combination of high quality unsupervised medical data, supervised data, and preference alignment data, aimed at enhancing both its versatility and precision in medical tasks. The model was evaluated through the public CBLUE benchmark and a manually constructed dataset ClinicalQA. The results demonstrate that MedGo achieved promising performance across various Chinese medical information processing tasks, achieved the first place in the CBLUE evaluation. Additionally, on our constructed dataset ClinicalQA, MedGo outperformed its base model Qwen2, highlighting its potential to improve both automated medical question answering and clinical decision support. These experimental results demonstrate that MedGo possesses strong information processing capabilities in the medical field. At present, we have successfully deployed MedGo at Shanghai East Hospital.
NT-VOT211: A Large-Scale Benchmark for Night-time Visual Object Tracking
Authors: Yu Liu, Arif Mahmood, Muhammad Haris Khan
Date: 2024-10-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Object Tracking, Video Object Tracking, Visual Object Tracking

Many current visual object tracking benchmarks such as OTB100, NfS, UAV123, LaSOT, and GOT-10K, predominantly contain day-time scenarios while the challenges posed by the night-time has been less investigated. It is primarily because of the lack of a large-scale, well-annotated night-time benchmark for rigorously evaluating tracking algorithms. To this end, this paper presents NT-VOT211, a new benchmark tailored for evaluating visual object tracking algorithms in the challenging night-time conditions. NT-VOT211 consists of 211 diverse videos, offering 211,000 well-annotated frames with 8 attributes including camera motion, deformation, fast motion, motion blur, tiny target, distractors, occlusion and out-of-view. To the best of our knowledge, it is the largest night-time tracking benchmark to-date that is specifically designed to address unique challenges such as adverse visibility, image blur, and distractors inherent to night-time tracking scenarios. Through a comprehensive analysis of results obtained from 42 diverse tracking algorithms on NT-VOT211, we uncover the strengths and limitations of these algorithms, highlighting opportunities for enhancements in visual object tracking, particularly in environments with suboptimal lighting. Besides, a leaderboard for revealing performance rankings, annotation tools, comprehensive meta-information and all the necessary code for reproducibility of results is made publicly available. We believe that our NT-VOT211 benchmark will not only be instrumental in facilitating field deployment of VOT algorithms, but will also help VOT enhancements and it will unlock new real-world tracking applications. Our dataset and other assets can be found at: {https://github.com/LiuYuML/NV-VOT211.