Africa
ARAIDA: Analogical Reasoning-Augmented Interactive Data Annotation
Huang, Chen, Jin, Yiping, Ilievski, Ilija, Lei, Wenqiang, Lv, Jiancheng
Human annotation is a time-consuming task that requires a significant amount of effort. To address this issue, interactive data annotation utilizes an annotation model to provide suggestions for humans to approve or correct. However, annotation models trained with limited labeled data are prone to generating incorrect suggestions, leading to extra human correction effort. To tackle this challenge, we propose Araida, an analogical reasoning-based approach that enhances automatic annotation accuracy in the interactive data annotation setting and reduces the need for human corrections. Araida involves an error-aware integration strategy that dynamically coordinates an annotation model and a k-nearest neighbors (KNN) model, giving more importance to KNN's predictions when predictions from the annotation model are deemed inaccurate. Empirical studies demonstrate that Araida is adaptable to different annotation tasks and models. On average, it reduces human correction labor by 11.02% compared to vanilla interactive data annotation methods.
Leveraging Knowlegde Graphs for Interpretable Feature Generation
Bouadi, Mohamed, Alavi, Arta, Benbernou, Salima, Ouziri, Mourad
The quality of Machine Learning (ML) models strongly depends on the input data, as such Feature Engineering (FE) is often required in ML. In addition, with the proliferation of ML-powered systems, especially in critical contexts, the need for interpretability and explainability becomes increasingly important. Since manual FE is time-consuming and requires case specific knowledge, we propose KRAFT, an AutoFE framework that leverages a knowledge graph to guide the generation of interpretable features. Our hybrid AI approach combines a neural generator to transform raw features through a series of transformations and a knowledge-based reasoner to evaluate features interpretability using Description Logics (DL). The generator is trained through Deep Reinforcement Learning (DRL) to maximize the prediction accuracy and the interpretability of the generated features. Extensive experiments on real datasets demonstrate that KRAFT significantly improves accuracy while ensuring a high level of interpretability.
CLAMBER: A Benchmark of Identifying and Clarifying Ambiguous Information Needs in Large Language Models
Zhang, Tong, Qin, Peixin, Deng, Yang, Huang, Chen, Lei, Wenqiang, Liu, Junhong, Jin, Dingnan, Liang, Hongru, Chua, Tat-Seng
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to meet user information needs, but their effectiveness in dealing with user queries that contain various types of ambiguity remains unknown, ultimately risking user trust and satisfaction. To this end, we introduce CLAMBER, a benchmark for evaluating LLMs using a well-organized taxonomy. Building upon the taxonomy, we construct ~12K high-quality data to assess the strengths, weaknesses, and potential risks of various off-the-shelf LLMs. Our findings indicate the limited practical utility of current LLMs in identifying and clarifying ambiguous user queries, even enhanced by chain-of-thought (CoT) and few-shot prompting. These techniques may result in overconfidence in LLMs and yield only marginal enhancements in identifying ambiguity. Furthermore, current LLMs fall short in generating high-quality clarifying questions due to a lack of conflict resolution and inaccurate utilization of inherent knowledge. In this paper, CLAMBER presents a guidance and promotes further research on proactive and trustworthy LLMs. Our dataset is available at https://github.com/zt991211/CLAMBER
Boosting Model Resilience via Implicit Adversarial Data Augmentation
Zhou, Xiaoling, Ye, Wei, Lee, Zhemg, Xie, Rui, Zhang, Shikun
Data augmentation plays a pivotal role in enhancing and diversifying training data. Nonetheless, consistently improving model performance in varied learning scenarios, especially those with inherent data biases, remains challenging. To address this, we propose to augment the deep features of samples by incorporating their adversarial and anti-adversarial perturbation distributions, enabling adaptive adjustment in the learning difficulty tailored to each sample's specific characteristics. We then theoretically reveal that our augmentation process approximates the optimization of a surrogate loss function as the number of augmented copies increases indefinitely. This insight leads us to develop a meta-learning-based framework for optimizing classifiers with this novel loss, introducing the effects of augmentation while bypassing the explicit augmentation process. We conduct extensive experiments across four common biased learning scenarios: long-tail learning, generalized long-tail learning, noisy label learning, and subpopulation shift learning. The empirical results demonstrate that our method consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance, highlighting its broad adaptability.
Voice EHR: Introducing Multimodal Audio Data for Health
Anibal, James, Huth, Hannah, Li, Ming, Hazen, Lindsey, Lam, Yen Minh, Nguyen, Hang, Hong, Phuc, Kleinman, Michael, Ost, Shelley, Jackson, Christopher, Sprabery, Laura, Elangovan, Cheran, Krishnaiah, Balaji, Akst, Lee, Lina, Ioan, Elyazar, Iqbal, Ekwati, Lenny, Jansen, Stefan, Nduwayezu, Richard, Garcia, Charisse, Plum, Jeffrey, Brenner, Jacqueline, Song, Miranda, Ricotta, Emily, Clifton, David, Thwaites, C. Louise, Bensoussan, Yael, Wood, Bradford
Large AI models trained on audio data may have the potential to rapidly classify patients, enhancing medical decision-making and potentially improving outcomes through early detection. Existing technologies depend on limited datasets using expensive recording equipment in high-income, English-speaking countries. This challenges deployment in resource-constrained, high-volume settings where audio data may have a profound impact. This report introduces a novel data type and a corresponding collection system that captures health data through guided questions using only a mobile/web application. This application ultimately results in an audio electronic health record (voice EHR) which may contain complex biomarkers of health from conventional voice/respiratory features, speech patterns, and language with semantic meaning - compensating for the typical limitations of unimodal clinical datasets. This report introduces a consortium of partners for global work, presents the application used for data collection, and showcases the potential of informative voice EHR to advance the scalability and diversity of audio AI.
Arabic Handwritten Text for Person Biometric Identification: A Deep Learning Approach
Balat, Mazen, Mohamed, Youssef, Heakl, Ahmed, Zaky, Ahmed
This study thoroughly investigates how well deep learning models can recognize Arabic handwritten text for person biometric identification. It compares three advanced architectures -- ResNet50, MobileNetV2, and EfficientNetB7 -- using three widely recognized datasets: AHAWP, Khatt, and LAMIS-MSHD. Results show that EfficientNetB7 outperforms the others, achieving test accuracies of 98.57\%, 99.15\%, and 99.79\% on AHAWP, Khatt, and LAMIS-MSHD datasets, respectively. EfficientNetB7's exceptional performance is credited to its innovative techniques, including compound scaling, depth-wise separable convolutions, and squeeze-and-excitation blocks. These features allow the model to extract more abstract and distinctive features from handwritten text images. The study's findings hold significant implications for enhancing identity verification and authentication systems, highlighting the potential of deep learning in Arabic handwritten text recognition for person biometric identification.
Google's AI Overviews Will Always Be Broken. That's How AI Works
A week after its algorithms advised people to eat rocks and put glue on pizza, Google admitted Thursday that it needed to make adjustments to its bold new generative AI search feature. The episode highlights the risks of Google's aggressive drive to commercialize generative AI--and also the treacherous and fundamental limitations of that technology. Google's AI Overviews feature draws on Gemini, a large language model like the one behind OpenAI's ChatGPT, to generate written answers to some search queries by summarizing information found online. The current AI boom is built around LLMs' impressive fluency with text, but the software can also use that facility to put a convincing gloss on untruths or errors. Using the technology to summarize online information promises can make search results easier to digest, but it is hazardous when online sources are contractionary or when people may use the information to make important decisions.
It's the AI Election Year
In the largest global election year yet, generative AI is already being used to trick and manipulate voters around the world. Will this growing trend have real impact? Today on WIRED Politics Lab, we talk about a new online project that will be tracking the use of AI in elections around the world. Plus, Nilesh Christopher dives into the lucrative industry of deepfakes, and how politicians are using them to bombard Indian voters. Be sure to subscribe to the WIRED Politics Lab newsletter here.
AI-Powered Autonomous Weapons Risk Geopolitical Instability and Threaten AI Research
Simmons-Edler, Riley, Badman, Ryan, Longpre, Shayne, Rajan, Kanaka
The recent embrace of machine learning (ML) in the development of autonomous weapons systems (AWS) creates serious risks to geopolitical stability and the free exchange of ideas in AI research. This topic has received comparatively little attention of late compared to risks stemming from superintelligent artificial general intelligence (AGI), but requires fewer assumptions about the course of technological development and is thus a nearer-future issue. ML is already enabling the substitution of AWS for human soldiers in many battlefield roles, reducing the upfront human cost, and thus political cost, of waging offensive war. In the case of peer adversaries, this increases the likelihood of "low intensity" conflicts which risk escalation to broader warfare. In the case of non-peer adversaries, it reduces the domestic blowback to wars of aggression. This effect can occur regardless of other ethical issues around the use of military AI such as the risk of civilian casualties, and does not require any superhuman AI capabilities. Further, the military value of AWS raises the specter of an AI-powered arms race and the misguided imposition of national security restrictions on AI research. Our goal in this paper is to raise awareness among the public and ML researchers on the near-future risks posed by full or near-full autonomy in military technology, and we provide regulatory suggestions to mitigate these risks. We call upon AI policy experts and the defense AI community in particular to embrace transparency and caution in their development and deployment of AWS to avoid the negative effects on global stability and AI research that we highlight here.
Sheaf HyperNetworks for Personalized Federated Learning
Nguyen, Bao, Sani, Lorenzo, Qiu, Xinchi, Liò, Pietro, Lane, Nicholas D.
Graph hypernetworks (GHNs), constructed by combining graph neural networks (GNNs) with hypernetworks (HNs), leverage relational data across various domains such as neural architecture search, molecular property prediction and federated learning. Despite GNNs and HNs being individually successful, we show that GHNs present problems compromising their performance, such as over-smoothing and heterophily. Moreover, we cannot apply GHNs directly to personalized federated learning (PFL) scenarios, where a priori client relation graph may be absent, private, or inaccessible. To mitigate these limitations in the context of PFL, we propose a novel class of HNs, sheaf hypernetworks (SHNs), which combine cellular sheaf theory with HNs to improve parameter sharing for PFL. We thoroughly evaluate SHNs across diverse PFL tasks, including multi-class classification, traffic and weather forecasting. Additionally, we provide a methodology for constructing client relation graphs in scenarios where such graphs are unavailable. We show that SHNs consistently outperform existing PFL solutions in complex non-IID scenarios. While the baselines' performance fluctuates depending on the task, SHNs show improvements of up to 2.7% in accuracy and 5.3% in lower mean squared error over the best-performing baseline.