pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Computation-friendly Graph Neural Network Design by Accumulating Knowledge on Large Language Models
Authors: Jialiang Wang, Shimin Di, Hanmo Liu, Zhili Wang, Jiachuan Wang, Lei Chen, Xiaofang Zhou
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Neural Network

Graph Neural Networks (GNNs), like other neural networks, have shown remarkable success but are hampered by the complexity of their architecture designs, which heavily depend on specific data and tasks. Traditionally, designing proper architectures involves trial and error, which requires intensive manual effort to optimize various components. To reduce human workload, researchers try to develop automated algorithms to design GNNs. However, both experts and automated algorithms suffer from two major issues in designing GNNs: 1) the substantial computational resources expended in repeatedly trying candidate GNN architectures until a feasible design is achieved, and 2) the intricate and prolonged processes required for humans or algorithms to accumulate knowledge of the interrelationship between graphs, GNNs, and performance. To further enhance the automation of GNN architecture design, we propose a computation-friendly way to empower Large Language Models (LLMs) with specialized knowledge in designing GNNs, thereby drastically shortening the computational overhead and development cycle of designing GNN architectures. Our framework begins by establishing a knowledge retrieval pipeline that comprehends the intercorrelations between graphs, GNNs, and performance. This pipeline converts past model design experiences into structured knowledge for LLM reference, allowing it to quickly suggest initial model proposals. Subsequently, we introduce a knowledge-driven search strategy that emulates the exploration-exploitation process of human experts, enabling quick refinement of initial proposals within a promising scope. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our framework can efficiently deliver promising (e.g., Top-5.77%) initial model proposals for unseen datasets within seconds and without any prior training and achieve outstanding search performance in a few iterations.
Variational Learning of Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models through Stochastic Gradient Annealed Importance Sampling
Authors: Jian Xu, Shian Du, Junmei Yang, Qianli Ma, Delu Zeng
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Dimensionality Reduction

Gaussian Process Latent Variable Models (GPLVMs) have become increasingly popular for unsupervised tasks such as dimensionality reduction and missing data recovery due to their flexibility and non-linear nature. An importance-weighted version of the Bayesian GPLVMs has been proposed to obtain a tighter variational bound. However, this version of the approach is primarily limited to analyzing simple data structures, as the generation of an effective proposal distribution can become quite challenging in high-dimensional spaces or with complex data sets. In this work, we propose an Annealed Importance Sampling (AIS) approach to address these issues. By transforming the posterior into a sequence of intermediate distributions using annealing, we combine the strengths of Sequential Monte Carlo samplers and VI to explore a wider range of posterior distributions and gradually approach the target distribution. We further propose an efficient algorithm by reparameterizing all variables in the evidence lower bound (ELBO). Experimental results on both toy and image datasets demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of tighter variational bounds, higher log-likelihoods, and more robust convergence.
Information Geometry and Beta Link for Optimizing Sparse Variational Student-t Processes
Authors: Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Computational Efficiency

Recently, a sparse version of Student-t Processes, termed sparse variational Student-t Processes, has been proposed to enhance computational efficiency and flexibility for real-world datasets using stochastic gradient descent. However, traditional gradient descent methods like Adam may not fully exploit the parameter space geometry, potentially leading to slower convergence and suboptimal performance. To mitigate these issues, we adopt natural gradient methods from information geometry for variational parameter optimization of Student-t Processes. This approach leverages the curvature and structure of the parameter space, utilizing tools such as the Fisher information matrix which is linked to the Beta function in our model. This method provides robust mathematical support for the natural gradient algorithm when using Student's t-distribution as the variational distribution. Additionally, we present a mini-batch algorithm for efficiently computing natural gradients. Experimental results across four benchmark datasets demonstrate that our method consistently accelerates convergence speed.
SlotLifter: Slot-guided Feature Lifting for Learning Object-centric Radiance Fields
Authors: Yu Liu, Baoxiong Jia, Yixin Chen, Siyuan Huang
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Novel View Synthesis, Object

The ability to distill object-centric abstractions from intricate visual scenes underpins human-level generalization. Despite the significant progress in object-centric learning methods, learning object-centric representations in the 3D physical world remains a crucial challenge. In this work, we propose SlotLifter, a novel object-centric radiance model addressing scene reconstruction and decomposition jointly via slot-guided feature lifting. Such a design unites object-centric learning representations and image-based rendering methods, offering state-of-the-art performance in scene decomposition and novel-view synthesis on four challenging synthetic and four complex real-world datasets, outperforming existing 3D object-centric learning methods by a large margin. Through extensive ablative studies, we showcase the efficacy of designs in SlotLifter, revealing key insights for potential future directions.
DC3DO: Diffusion Classifier for 3D Objects
Authors: Nursena Koprucu, Meher Shashwat Nigam, Shicheng Xu, Biruk Abere, Gabriele Dominici, Andrew Rodriguez, Sharvaree Vadgam, Berfin Inal, Alberto Tono
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: 3D Object Classification, Classification, Multimodal Reasoning, Object, zero-shot-classification, Zero-Shot Learning

Inspired by Geoffrey Hinton emphasis on generative modeling, To recognize shapes, first learn to generate them, we explore the use of 3D diffusion models for object classification. Leveraging the density estimates from these models, our approach, the Diffusion Classifier for 3D Objects (DC3DO), enables zero-shot classification of 3D shapes without additional training. On average, our method achieves a 12.5 percent improvement compared to its multiview counterparts, demonstrating superior multimodal reasoning over discriminative approaches. DC3DO employs a class-conditional diffusion model trained on ShapeNet, and we run inferences on point clouds of chairs and cars. This work highlights the potential of generative models in 3D object classification.
Masked Image Modeling: A Survey
Authors: Vlad Hondru, Florinel Alin Croitoru, Shervin Minaee, Radu Tudor Ionescu, Nicu Sebe
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Contrastive Learning, Self-Supervised Learning, Survey

In this work, we survey recent studies on masked image modeling (MIM), an approach that emerged as a powerful self-supervised learning technique in computer vision. The MIM task involves masking some information, e.g.~pixels, patches, or even latent representations, and training a model, usually an autoencoder, to predicting the missing information by using the context available in the visible part of the input. We identify and formalize two categories of approaches on how to implement MIM as a pretext task, one based on reconstruction and one based on contrastive learning. Then, we construct a taxonomy and review the most prominent papers in recent years. We complement the manually constructed taxonomy with a dendrogram obtained by applying a hierarchical clustering algorithm. We further identify relevant clusters via manually inspecting the resulting dendrogram. Our review also includes datasets that are commonly used in MIM research. We aggregate the performance results of various masked image modeling methods on the most popular datasets, to facilitate the comparison of competing methods. Finally, we identify research gaps and propose several interesting directions of future work. We supplement our survey with the following public repository containing organized references: https://github.com/vladhondru25/MIM-Survey.
Leveraging Priors via Diffusion Bridge for Time Series Generation
Authors: Jinseong Park, Seungyun Lee, Woojin Jeong, Yujin Choi, Jaewook Lee
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Data Augmentation, Time Series, Time Series Generation

Time series generation is widely used in real-world applications such as simulation, data augmentation, and hypothesis test techniques. Recently, diffusion models have emerged as the de facto approach for time series generation, emphasizing diverse synthesis scenarios based on historical or correlated time series data streams. Since time series have unique characteristics, such as fixed time order and data scaling, standard Gaussian prior might be ill-suited for general time series generation. In this paper, we exploit the usage of diverse prior distributions for synthesis. Then, we propose TimeBridge, a framework that enables flexible synthesis by leveraging diffusion bridges to learn the transport between chosen prior and data distributions. Our model covers a wide range of scenarios in time series diffusion models, which leverages (i) data- and time-dependent priors for unconditional synthesis, and (ii) data-scale preserving synthesis with a constraint as a prior for conditional generation. Experimentally, our model achieves state-of-the-art performance in both unconditional and conditional time series generation tasks.
RW-NSGCN: A Robust Approach to Structural Attacks via Negative Sampling
Authors: Shuqi He, Jun Zhuang, Ding Wang, Jun Song
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Anomaly Detection, Classification, Node Classification

Node classification using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) has been widely applied in various practical scenarios, such as predicting user interests and detecting communities in social networks. However, recent studies have shown that graph-structured networks often contain potential noise and attacks, in the form of topological perturbations and weight disturbances, which can lead to decreased classification performance in GNNs. To improve the robustness of the model, we propose a novel method: Random Walk Negative Sampling Graph Convolutional Network (RW-NSGCN). Specifically, RW-NSGCN integrates the Random Walk with Restart (RWR) and PageRank (PGR) algorithms for negative sampling and employs a Determinantal Point Process (DPP)-based GCN for convolution operations. RWR leverages both global and local information to manage noise and local variations, while PGR assesses node importance to stabilize the topological structure. The DPP-based GCN ensures diversity among negative samples and aggregates their features to produce robust node embeddings, thereby improving classification performance. Experimental results demonstrate that the RW-NSGCN model effectively addresses network topology attacks and weight instability, increasing the accuracy of anomaly detection and overall stability. In terms of classification accuracy, RW-NSGCN significantly outperforms existing methods, showing greater resilience across various scenarios and effectively mitigating the impact of such vulnerabilities.
Amuro and Char: Analyzing the Relationship between Pre-Training and Fine-Tuning of Large Language Models
Authors: Kaiser Sun, Mark Dredze
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Sensitivity

The development of large language models leads to the formation of a pre-train-then-align paradigm, in which the model is typically pre-trained on a large text corpus and undergoes a tuning stage to align the model with human preference or downstream tasks. In this work, we investigate the relationship between pre-training and fine-tuning by fine-tuning multiple intermediate pre-trained model checkpoints. Our results on 18 datasets suggest that i) continual pre-training improves the model in a latent way that unveils after fine-tuning; ii) with extra fine-tuning, the datasets that the model does not demonstrate capability gain much more than those that the model performs well during the pre-training stage; iii) although model benefits significantly through supervised fine-tuning, it may forget previously known domain knowledge and the tasks that are not seen during fine-tuning; iv) the model resembles high sensitivity to evaluation prompts after supervised fine-tuning, but this sensitivity can be alleviated by more pre-training.
Hierarchical Structured Neural Network: Efficient Retrieval Scaling for Large Scale Recommendation
Authors: Kaushik Rangadurai, Siyang Yuan, Minhui Huang, Yiqun Liu, Golnaz Ghasemiesfeh, Yunchen Pu, Haiyu Lu, Xingfeng He, Fangzhou Xu, Andrew Cui, Vidhoon Viswanathan, Lin Yang, Liang Wang, Jiyan Yang, Chonglin Sun
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Representation Learning, Retrieval

Retrieval, the initial stage of a recommendation system, is tasked with down-selecting items from a pool of tens of millions of candidates to a few thousands. Embedding Based Retrieval (EBR) has been a typical choice for this problem, addressing the computational demands of deep neural networks across vast item corpora. EBR utilizes Two Tower or Siamese Networks to learn representations for users and items, and employ Approximate Nearest Neighbor (ANN) search to efficiently retrieve relevant items. Despite its popularity in industry, EBR faces limitations. The Two Tower architecture, relying on a single dot product interaction, struggles to capture complex data distributions due to limited capability in learning expressive interactions between users and items. Additionally, ANN index building and representation learning for user and item are often separate, leading to inconsistencies exacerbated by representation (e.g. continuous online training) and item drift (e.g. items expired and new items added). In this paper, we introduce the Hierarchical Structured Neural Network (HSNN), an efficient deep neural network model to learn intricate user and item interactions beyond the commonly used dot product in retrieval tasks, achieving sublinear computational costs relative to corpus size. A Modular Neural Network (MoNN) is designed to maintain high expressiveness for interaction learning while ensuring efficiency. A mixture of MoNNs operate on a hierarchical item index to achieve extensive computation sharing, enabling it to scale up to large corpus size. MoNN and the hierarchical index are jointly learnt to continuously adapt to distribution shifts in both user interests and item distributions. HSNN achieves substantial improvement in offline evaluation compared to prevailing methods.
EditScribe: Non-Visual Image Editing with Natural Language Verification Loops
Authors: Ruei-Che Chang, Yuxuan Liu, Lotus Zhang, Anhong Guo
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00

Image editing is an iterative process that requires precise visual evaluation and manipulation for the output to match the editing intent. However, current image editing tools do not provide accessible interaction nor sufficient feedback for blind and low vision individuals to achieve this level of control. To address this, we developed EditScribe, a prototype system that makes image editing accessible using natural language verification loops powered by large multimodal models. Using EditScribe, the user first comprehends the image content through initial general and object descriptions, then specifies edit actions using open-ended natural language prompts. EditScribe performs the image edit, and provides four types of verification feedback for the user to verify the performed edit, including a summary of visual changes, AI judgement, and updated general and object descriptions. The user can ask follow-up questions to clarify and probe into the edits or verification feedback, before performing another edit. In a study with ten blind or low-vision users, we found that EditScribe supported participants to perform and verify image edit actions non-visually. We observed different prompting strategies from participants, and their perceptions on the various types of verification feedback. Finally, we discuss the implications of leveraging natural language verification loops to make visual authoring non-visually accessible.
WorldScribe: Towards Context-Aware Live Visual Descriptions
Authors: Ruei-Che Chang, Yuxuan Liu, Anhong Guo
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00

Automated live visual descriptions can aid blind people in understanding their surroundings with autonomy and independence. However, providing descriptions that are rich, contextual, and just-in-time has been a long-standing challenge in accessibility. In this work, we develop WorldScribe, a system that generates automated live real-world visual descriptions that are customizable and adaptive to users' contexts: (i) WorldScribe's descriptions are tailored to users' intents and prioritized based on semantic relevance. (ii) WorldScribe is adaptive to visual contexts, e.g., providing consecutively succinct descriptions for dynamic scenes, while presenting longer and detailed ones for stable settings. (iii) WorldScribe is adaptive to sound contexts, e.g., increasing volume in noisy environments, or pausing when conversations start. Powered by a suite of vision, language, and sound recognition models, WorldScribe introduces a description generation pipeline that balances the tradeoffs between their richness and latency to support real-time use. The design of WorldScribe is informed by prior work on providing visual descriptions and a formative study with blind participants. Our user study and subsequent pipeline evaluation show that WorldScribe can provide real-time and fairly accurate visual descriptions to facilitate environment understanding that is adaptive and customized to users' contexts. Finally, we discuss the implications and further steps toward making live visual descriptions more context-aware and humanized.
Generalized knowledge-enhanced framework for biomedical entity and relation extraction
Authors: Minh Nguyen, Phuong Le
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Relation, Relation Extraction

In recent years, there has been an increasing number of frameworks developed for biomedical entity and relation extraction. This research effort aims to address the accelerating growth in biomedical publications and the intricate nature of biomedical texts, which are written for mainly domain experts. To handle these challenges, we develop a novel framework that utilizes external knowledge to construct a task-independent and reusable background knowledge graph for biomedical entity and relation extraction. The design of our model is inspired by how humans learn domain-specific topics. In particular, humans often first acquire the most basic and common knowledge regarding a field to build the foundational knowledge and then use that as a basis for extending to various specialized topics. Our framework employs such common-knowledge-sharing mechanism to build a general neural-network knowledge graph that is learning transferable to different domain-specific biomedical texts effectively. Experimental evaluations demonstrate that our model, equipped with this generalized and cross-transferable knowledge base, achieves competitive performance benchmarks, including BioRelEx for binding interaction detection and ADE for Adverse Drug Effect identification.
Simple but Effective Compound Geometric Operations for Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion
Authors: Rui Ying, Mengting Hu, Jianfeng Wu, Yalan Xie, Xiaoyi Liu, Zhunheng Wang, Ming Jiang, Hang Gao, Linlin Zhang, Renhong Cheng
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graph Completion, Knowledge Graph Embedding, Knowledge Graphs, Mathematical Proofs, Relation, Temporal Knowledge Graph Completion

Temporal knowledge graph completion aims to infer the missing facts in temporal knowledge graphs. Current approaches usually embed factual knowledge into continuous vector space and apply geometric operations to learn potential patterns in temporal knowledge graphs. However, these methods only adopt a single operation, which may have limitations in capturing the complex temporal dynamics present in temporal knowledge graphs. Therefore, we propose a simple but effective method, i.e. TCompoundE, which is specially designed with two geometric operations, including time-specific and relation-specific operations. We provide mathematical proofs to demonstrate the ability of TCompoundE to encode various relation patterns. Experimental results show that our proposed model significantly outperforms existing temporal knowledge graph embedding models. Our code is available at https://github.com/nk-ruiying/TCompoundE.
Super-intelligence or Superstition? Exploring Psychological Factors Influencing Belief in AI Predictions about Personal Behavior
Authors: Eunhae Lee, Pat Pataranutaporn, Judith Amores, Pattie Maes
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00

Could belief in AI predictions be just another form of superstition? This study investigates psychological factors that influence belief in AI predictions about personal behavior, comparing it to belief in astrology- and personality-based predictions. Through an experiment with 238 participants, we examined how cognitive style, paranormal beliefs, AI attitudes, personality traits, and other factors affect perceived validity, reliability, usefulness, and personalization of predictions from different sources. Our findings reveal that belief in AI predictions is positively correlated with belief in predictions based on astrology and personality psychology. Notably, paranormal beliefs and positive attitudes about AI significantly increased perceived validity, reliability, usefulness, and personalization of AI predictions. Conscientiousness was negatively correlated with belief in predictions across all sources, and interest in the prediction topic increased believability across predictions. Surprisingly, we found no evidence that cognitive style has an impact on belief in fictitious AI-generated predictions. These results highlight the "rational superstition" phenomenon in AI, where belief is driven more by mental heuristics and intuition than critical evaluation. This research advances our understanding of the psychology of human-AI interaction, offering insights into designing and promoting AI systems that foster appropriate trust and skepticism, critical for responsible integration in an increasingly AI-driven world.
A Perspective on Large Language Models, Intelligent Machines, and Knowledge Acquisition
Authors: Vladimir Cherkassky, Eng Hock Lee
Date: 2024-08-13 00:00:00
Tasks: Common Sense Reasoning, Math

Large Language Models (LLMs) are known for their remarkable ability to generate synthesized 'knowledge', such as text documents, music, images, etc. However, there is a huge gap between LLM's and human capabilities for understanding abstract concepts and reasoning. We discuss these issues in a larger philosophical context of human knowledge acquisition and the Turing test. In addition, we illustrate the limitations of LLMs by analyzing GPT-4 responses to questions ranging from science and math to common sense reasoning. These examples show that GPT-4 can often imitate human reasoning, even though it lacks understanding. However, LLM responses are synthesized from a large LLM model trained on all available data. In contrast, human understanding is based on a small number of abstract concepts. Based on this distinction, we discuss the impact of LLMs on acquisition of human knowledge and education.