Usefulness of LLMs as an Author Checklist Assistant for Scientific Papers: NeurIPS'24 Experiment

Large language models (LLMs) represent a promising, but controversial, tool in aiding scientific peer review. This study evaluates the usefulness of LLMs in a conference setting as a tool for vetting paper submissions against submission standards. We conduct an experiment at the 2024 Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, where 234 papers were voluntarily submitted to an "LLM-based Checklist Assistant." This assistant validates whether papers adhere to the author checklist used by NeurIPS, which includes questions to ensure compliance with research and manuscript preparation standards. Evaluation of the assistant by NeurIPS paper authors suggests that the LLM-based assistant was generally helpful in verifying checklist completion. In post-usage surveys, over 70% of authors found the assistant useful, and 70% indicate that they would revise their papers or checklist responses based on its feedback. While causal attribution to the assistant is not definitive, qualitative evidence suggests that the LLM contributed to improving some submissions. Survey responses and analysis of re-submissions indicate that authors made substantive revisions to their submissions in response to specific feedback from the LLM. The experiment also highlights common issues with LLMs: inaccuracy (20/52) and excessive strictness (14/52) were the most frequent issues flagged by authors. We also conduct experiments to understand potential gaming of the system, which reveal that the assistant could be manipulated to enhance scores through fabricated justifications, highlighting potential vulnerabilities of automated review tools.

FAIR Universe HiggsML Uncertainty Challenge Competition

The FAIR Universe -- HiggsML Uncertainty Challenge focuses on measuring the physics properties of elementary particles with imperfect simulators due to differences in modelling systematic errors. Additionally, the challenge is leveraging a large-compute-scale AI platform for sharing datasets, training models, and hosting machine learning competitions. Our challenge brings together the physics and machine learning communities to advance our understanding and methodologies in handling systematic (epistemic) uncertainties within AI techniques.

RelevAI-Reviewer: A Benchmark on AI Reviewers for Survey Paper Relevance

Recent advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI), particularly the widespread adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs), have significantly enhanced text analysis capabilities. This technological evolution offers considerable promise for automating the review of scientific papers, a task traditionally managed through peer review by fellow researchers. Despite its critical role in maintaining research quality, the conventional peer-review process is often slow and subject to biases, potentially impeding the swift propagation of scientific knowledge. In this paper, we propose RelevAI-Reviewer, an automatic system that conceptualizes the task of survey paper review as a classification problem, aimed at assessing the relevance of a paper in relation to a specified prompt, analogous to a "call for papers". To address this, we introduce a novel dataset comprised of 25,164 instances. Each instance contains one prompt and four candidate papers, each varying in relevance to the prompt. The objective is to develop a machine learning (ML) model capable of determining the relevance of each paper and identifying the most pertinent one. We explore various baseline approaches, including traditional ML classifiers like Support Vector Machine (SVM) and advanced language models such as BERT. Preliminary findings indicate that the BERT-based end-to-end classifier surpasses other conventional ML methods in performance. We present this problem as a public challenge to foster engagement and interest in this area of research.

Depth Estimation using Weighted-loss and Transfer Learning

Depth estimation from 2D images is a common computer vision task that has applications in many fields including autonomous vehicles, scene understanding and robotics. The accuracy of a supervised depth estimation method mainly relies on the chosen loss function, the model architecture, quality of data and performance metrics. In this study, we propose a simplified and adaptable approach to improve depth estimation accuracy using transfer learning and an optimized loss function. The optimized loss function is a combination of weighted losses to which enhance robustness and generalization: Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Edge Loss and Structural Similarity Index (SSIM). We use a grid search and a random search method to find optimized weights for the losses, which leads to an improved model. We explore multiple encoder-decoder-based models including DenseNet121, DenseNet169, DenseNet201, and EfficientNet for the supervised depth estimation model on NYU Depth Dataset v2. We observe that the EfficientNet model, pre-trained on ImageNet for classification when used as an encoder, with a simple upsampling decoder, gives the best results in terms of RSME, REL and log10: 0.386, 0.113 and 0.049, respectively. We also perform a qualitative analysis which illustrates that our model produces depth maps that closely resemble ground truth, even in cases where the ground truth is flawed. The results indicate significant improvements in accuracy and robustness, with EfficientNet being the most successful architecture.

Beyond the Known: Adversarial Autoencoders in Novelty Detection

In novelty detection, the goal is to decide if a new data point should be categorized as an inlier or an outlier, given a training dataset that primarily captures the inlier distribution. Recent approaches typically use deep encoder and decoder network frameworks to derive a reconstruction error, and employ this error either to determine a novelty score, or as the basis for a one-class classifier. In this research, we use a similar framework but with a lightweight deep network, and we adopt a probabilistic score with reconstruction error. Our methodology calculates the probability of whether the sample comes from the inlier distribution or not. This work makes two key contributions. The first is that we compute the novelty probability by linearizing the manifold that holds the structure of the inlier distribution. This allows us to interpret how the probability is distributed and can be determined in relation to the local coordinates of the manifold tangent space. The second contribution is that we improve the training protocol for the network. Our results indicate that our approach is effective at learning the target class, and it outperforms recent state-of-the-art methods on several benchmark datasets.

Synthesizing CTA Image Data for Type-B Aortic Dissection using Stable Diffusion Models

Stable Diffusion (SD) has gained a lot of attention in recent years in the field of Generative AI thus helping in synthesizing medical imaging data with distinct features. The aim is to contribute to the ongoing effort focused on overcoming the limitations of data scarcity and improving the capabilities of ML algorithms for cardiovascular image processing. Therefore, in this study, the possibility of generating synthetic cardiac CTA images was explored by fine-tuning stable diffusion models based on user defined text prompts, using only limited number of CTA images as input. A comprehensive evaluation of the synthetic data was conducted by incorporating both quantitative analysis and qualitative assessment, where a clinician assessed the quality of the generated data. It has been shown that Cardiac CTA images can be successfully generated using using Text to Image (T2I) stable diffusion model. The results demonstrate that the tuned T2I CTA diffusion model was able to generate images with features that are typically unique to acute type B aortic dissection (TBAD) medical conditions.

Meta-Album: Multi-domain Meta-Dataset for Few-Shot Image Classification

We introduce Meta-Album, an image classification meta-dataset designed to facilitate few-shot learning, transfer learning, meta-learning, among other tasks. It includes 40 open datasets, each having at least 20 classes with 40 examples per class, with verified licences. They stem from diverse domains, such as ecology (fauna and flora), manufacturing (textures, vehicles), human actions, and optical character recognition, featuring various image scales (microscopic, human scales, remote sensing). All datasets are preprocessed, annotated, and formatted uniformly, and come in 3 versions (Micro $\subset$ Mini $\subset$ Extended) to match users' computational resources. We showcase the utility of the first 30 datasets on few-shot learning problems. The other 10 will be released shortly after. Meta-Album is already more diverse and larger (in number of datasets) than similar efforts, and we are committed to keep enlarging it via a series of competitions. As competitions terminate, their test data are released, thus creating a rolling benchmark, available through OpenML.org. Our website https://meta-album.github.io/ contains the source code of challenge winning methods, baseline methods, data loaders, and instructions for contributing either new datasets or algorithms to our expandable meta-dataset.

NeurIPS'22 Cross-Domain MetaDL competition: Design and baseline results

We present the design and baseline results for a new challenge in the ChaLearn meta-learning series, accepted at NeurIPS'22, focusing on "cross-domain" meta-learning. Meta-learning aims to leverage experience gained from previous tasks to solve new tasks efficiently (i.e., with better performance, little training data, and/or modest computational resources). While previous challenges in the series focused on within-domain few-shot learning problems, with the aim of learning efficiently N-way k-shot tasks (i.e., N class classification problems with k training examples), this competition challenges the participants to solve "any-way" and "any-shot" problems drawn from various domains (healthcare, ecology, biology, manufacturing, and others), chosen for their humanitarian and societal impact. To that end, we created Meta-Album, a meta-dataset of 40 image classification datasets from 10 domains, from which we carve out tasks with any number of "ways" (within the range 2-20) and any number of "shots" (within the range 1-20). The competition is with code submission, fully blind-tested on the CodaLab challenge platform. The code of the winners will be open-sourced, enabling the deployment of automated machine learning solutions for few-shot image classification across several domains.

Survey on Reliable Deep Learning-Based Person Re-Identification Models: Are We There Yet?

Intelligent video-surveillance (IVS) is currently an active research field in computer vision and machine learning and provides useful tools for surveillance operators and forensic video investigators. Person re-identification (PReID) is one of the most critical problems in IVS, and it consists of recognizing whether or not an individual has already been observed over a camera in a network. Solutions to PReID have myriad applications including retrieval of video-sequences showing an individual of interest or even pedestrian tracking over multiple camera views. Different techniques have been proposed to increase the performance of PReID in the literature, and more recently researchers utilized deep neural networks (DNNs) given their compelling performance on similar vision problems and fast execution at test time. Given the importance and wide range of applications of re-identification solutions, our objective herein is to discuss the work carried out in the area and come up with a survey of state-of-the-art DNN models being used for this task. We present descriptions of each model along with their evaluation on a set of benchmark datasets. Finally, we show a detailed comparison among these models, which are followed by some discussions on their limitations that can work as guidelines for future research.

2018 Robotic Scene Segmentation Challenge

In 2015 we began a sub-challenge at the EndoVis workshop at MICCAI in Munich using endoscope images of ex-vivo tissue with automatically generated annotations from robot forward kinematics and instrument CAD models. However, the limited background variation and simple motion rendered the dataset uninformative in learning about which techniques would be suitable for segmentation in real surgery. In 2017, at the same workshop in Quebec we introduced the robotic instrument segmentation dataset with 10 teams participating in the challenge to perform binary, articulating parts and type segmentation of da Vinci instruments. This challenge included realistic instrument motion and more complex porcine tissue as background and was widely addressed with modifications on U-Nets and other popular CNN architectures. In 2018 we added to the complexity by introducing a set of anatomical objects and medical devices to the segmented classes. To avoid over-complicating the challenge, we continued with porcine data which is dramatically simpler than human tissue due to the lack of fatty tissue occluding many organs.