Africa
Bias Mitigation via Compensation: A Reinforcement Learning Perspective
Swaminathan, Nandhini, Danks, David
As AI increasingly integrates with human decision-making, we must carefully consider interactions between the two. In particular, current approaches focus on optimizing individual agent actions but often overlook the nuances of collective intelligence. Group dynamics might require that one agent (e.g., the AI system) compensate for biases and errors in another agent (e.g., the human), but this compensation should be carefully developed. We provide a theoretical framework for algorithmic compensation that synthesizes game theory and reinforcement learning principles to demonstrate the natural emergence of deceptive outcomes from the continuous learning dynamics of agents. We provide simulation results involving Markov Decision Processes (MDP) learning to interact. This work then underpins our ethical analysis of the conditions in which AI agents should adapt to biases and behaviors of other agents in dynamic and complex decision-making environments. Overall, our approach addresses the nuanced role of strategic deception of humans, challenging previous assumptions about its detrimental effects. We assert that compensation for others' biases can enhance coordination and ethical alignment: strategic deception, when ethically managed, can positively shape human-AI interactions.
Guiding Attention in End-to-End Driving Models
Porres, Diego, Xiao, Yi, Villalonga, Gabriel, Levy, Alexandre, López, Antonio M.
Vision-based end-to-end driving models trained by imitation learning can lead to affordable solutions for autonomous driving. However, training these well-performing models usually requires a huge amount of data, while still lacking explicit and intuitive activation maps to reveal the inner workings of these models while driving. In this paper, we study how to guide the attention of these models to improve their driving quality and obtain more intuitive activation maps by adding a loss term during training using salient semantic maps. In contrast to previous work, our method does not require these salient semantic maps to be available during testing time, as well as removing the need to modify the model's architecture to which it is applied. We perform tests using perfect and noisy salient semantic maps with encouraging results in both, the latter of which is inspired by possible errors encountered with real data. Using CIL++ as a representative state-of-the-art model and the CARLA simulator with its standard benchmarks, we conduct experiments that show the effectiveness of our method in training better autonomous driving models, especially when data and computational resources are scarce.
Automated Construction of Theme-specific Knowledge Graphs
Ding, Linyi, Zhou, Sizhe, Xiao, Jinfeng, Han, Jiawei
Despite widespread applications of knowledge graphs (KGs) in various tasks such as question answering and intelligent conversational systems, existing KGs face two major challenges: information granularity and deficiency in timeliness. These hinder considerably the retrieval and analysis of in-context, fine-grained, and up-to-date knowledge from KGs, particularly in highly specialized themes (e.g., specialized scientific research) and rapidly evolving contexts (e.g., breaking news or disaster tracking). To tackle such challenges, we propose a theme-specific knowledge graph (i.e., ThemeKG), a KG constructed from a theme-specific corpus, and design an unsupervised framework for ThemeKG construction (named TKGCon). The framework takes raw theme-specific corpus and generates a high-quality KG that includes salient entities and relations under the theme. Specifically, we start with an entity ontology of the theme from Wikipedia, based on which we then generate candidate relations by Large Language Models (LLMs) to construct a relation ontology. To parse the documents from the theme corpus, we first map the extracted entity pairs to the ontology and retrieve the candidate relations. Finally, we incorporate the context and ontology to consolidate the relations for entity pairs. We observe that directly prompting GPT-4 for theme-specific KG leads to inaccurate entities (such as "two main types" as one entity in the query result) and unclear (such as "is", "has") or wrong relations (such as "have due to", "to start"). In contrast, by constructing the theme-specific KG step by step, our model outperforms GPT-4 and could consistently identify accurate entities and relations. Experimental results also show that our framework excels in evaluations compared with various KG construction baselines.
Scalable Event-by-event Processing of Neuromorphic Sensory Signals With Deep State-Space Models
Schöne, Mark, Sushma, Neeraj Mohan, Zhuge, Jingyue, Mayr, Christian, Subramoney, Anand, Kappel, David
Event-based sensors are well suited for real-time processing due to their fast response times and encoding of the sensory data as successive temporal differences. These and other valuable properties, such as a high dynamic range, are suppressed when the data is converted to a frame-based format. However, most current methods either collapse events into frames or cannot scale up when processing the event data directly event-by-event. In this work, we address the key challenges of scaling up event-by-event modeling of the long event streams emitted by such sensors, which is a particularly relevant problem for neuromorphic computing. While prior methods can process up to a few thousand time steps, our model, based on modern recurrent deep state-space models, scales to event streams of millions of events for both training and inference.We leverage their stable parameterization for learning long-range dependencies, parallelizability along the sequence dimension, and their ability to integrate asynchronous events effectively to scale them up to long event streams.We further augment these with novel event-centric techniques enabling our model to match or beat the state-of-the-art performance on several event stream benchmarks. In the Spiking Speech Commands task, we improve state-of-the-art by a large margin of 6.6% to 87.1%. On the DVS128-Gestures dataset, we achieve competitive results without using frames or convolutional neural networks. Our work demonstrates, for the first time, that it is possible to use fully event-based processing with purely recurrent networks to achieve state-of-the-art task performance in several event-based benchmarks.
Unleashing the Power of Multi-Task Learning: A Comprehensive Survey Spanning Traditional, Deep, and Pretrained Foundation Model Eras
Yu, Jun, Dai, Yutong, Liu, Xiaokang, Huang, Jin, Shen, Yishan, Zhang, Ke, Zhou, Rong, Adhikarla, Eashan, Ye, Wenxuan, Liu, Yixin, Kong, Zhaoming, Zhang, Kai, Yin, Yilong, Namboodiri, Vinod, Davison, Brian D., Moore, Jason H., Chen, Yong
MTL is a learning paradigm that effectively leverages both task-specific and shared information to address multiple related tasks simultaneously. In contrast to STL, MTL offers a suite of benefits that enhance both the training process and the inference efficiency. MTL's key advantages encompass streamlined model architecture, performance enhancement, and cross-domain generalizability. Over the past twenty years, MTL has become widely recognized as a flexible and effective approach in various fields, including CV, NLP, recommendation systems, disease prognosis and diagnosis, and robotics. This survey provides a comprehensive overview of the evolution of MTL, encompassing the technical aspects of cutting-edge methods from traditional approaches to deep learning and the latest trend of pretrained foundation models. Our survey methodically categorizes MTL techniques into five key areas: regularization, relationship learning, feature propagation, optimization, and pre-training. This categorization not only chronologically outlines the development of MTL but also dives into various specialized strategies within each category. Furthermore, the survey reveals how the MTL evolves from handling a fixed set of tasks to embracing a more flexible approach free from task or modality constraints. It explores the concepts of task-promptable and -agnostic training, along with the capacity for ZSL, which unleashes the untapped potential of this historically coveted learning paradigm. Overall, we hope this survey provides the research community with a comprehensive overview of the advancements in MTL from its inception in 1997 to the present in 2023. We address present challenges and look ahead to future possibilities, shedding light on the opportunities and potential avenues for MTL research in a broad manner. This project is publicly available at https://github.com/junfish/Awesome-Multitask-Learning.
FREB-TQA: A Fine-Grained Robustness Evaluation Benchmark for Table Question Answering
Zhou, Wei, Mesgar, Mohsen, Adel, Heike, Friedrich, Annemarie
Table Question Answering (TQA) aims at composing an answer to a question based on tabular data. While prior research has shown that TQA models lack robustness, understanding the underlying cause and nature of this issue remains predominantly unclear, posing a significant obstacle to the development of robust TQA systems. In this paper, we formalize three major desiderata for a fine-grained evaluation of robustness of TQA systems. They should (i) answer questions regardless of alterations in table structure, (ii) base their responses on the content of relevant cells rather than on biases, and (iii) demonstrate robust numerical reasoning capabilities. To investigate these aspects, we create and publish a novel TQA evaluation benchmark in English. Our extensive experimental analysis reveals that none of the examined state-of-the-art TQA systems consistently excels in these three aspects. Our benchmark is a crucial instrument for monitoring the behavior of TQA systems and paves the way for the development of robust TQA systems. We release our benchmark publicly.
PoPE: Legendre Orthogonal Polynomials Based Position Encoding for Large Language Models
There are several improvements proposed over the baseline Absolute Positional Encoding (APE) method used in original transformer. In this study, we aim to investigate the implications of inadequately representing positional encoding in higher dimensions on crucial aspects of the attention mechanism, the model's capacity to learn relative positional information, and the convergence of models, all stemming from the choice of sinusoidal basis functions. Through a combination of theoretical insights and empirical analyses, we elucidate how these challenges extend beyond APEs and may adversely affect the performance of Relative Positional Encoding (RPE) methods, such as Rotatory Positional Encoding (RoPE). Subsequently, we introduce an innovative solution termed Orthogonal Polynomial Based Positional Encoding (PoPE) to address some of the limitations associated with existing methods. The PoPE method encodes positional information by leveraging Orthogonal Legendre polynomials. Legendre polynomials as basis functions offers several desirable properties for positional encoding, including improved correlation structure, non-periodicity, orthogonality, and distinct functional forms among polynomials of varying orders. Our experimental findings demonstrate that transformer models incorporating PoPE outperform baseline transformer models on the $Multi30k$ English-to-German translation task, thus establishing a new performance benchmark. Furthermore, PoPE-based transformers exhibit significantly accelerated convergence rates. Additionally, we will present novel theoretical perspectives on position encoding based on the superior performance of PoPE.
ProMoAI: Process Modeling with Generative AI
Kourani, Humam, Berti, Alessandro, Schuster, Daniel, van der Aalst, Wil M. P.
ProMoAI is a novel tool that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate process models from textual descriptions, incorporating advanced prompt engineering, error handling, and code generation techniques. Beyond automating the generation of complex process models, ProMoAI also supports process model optimization. Users can interact with the tool by providing feedback on the generated model, which is then used for refining the process model. ProMoAI utilizes the capabilities LLMs to offer a novel, AI-driven approach to process modeling, significantly reducing the barrier to entry for users without deep technical knowledge in process modeling.
Benchmarking Benchmark Leakage in Large Language Models
Xu, Ruijie, Wang, Zengzhi, Fan, Run-Ze, Liu, Pengfei
Amid the expanding use of pre-training data, the phenomenon of benchmark dataset leakage has become increasingly prominent, exacerbated by opaque training processes and the often undisclosed inclusion of supervised data in contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs). This issue skews benchmark effectiveness and fosters potentially unfair comparisons, impeding the field's healthy development. To address this, we introduce a detection pipeline utilizing Perplexity and N-gram accuracy, two simple and scalable metrics that gauge a model's prediction precision on benchmark, to identify potential data leakages. By analyzing 31 LLMs under the context of mathematical reasoning, we reveal substantial instances of training even test set misuse, resulting in potentially unfair comparisons. These findings prompt us to offer several recommendations regarding model documentation, benchmark setup, and future evaluations. Notably, we propose the "Benchmark Transparency Card" to encourage clear documentation of benchmark utilization, promoting transparency and healthy developments of LLMs. we have made our leaderboard, pipeline implementation, and model predictions publicly available, fostering future research.
Talking Nonsense: Probing Large Language Models' Understanding of Adversarial Gibberish Inputs
Cherepanova, Valeriia, Zou, James
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit excellent ability to understand human languages, but do they also understand their own language that appears gibberish to us? In this work we delve into this question, aiming to uncover the mechanisms underlying such behavior in LLMs. We employ the Greedy Coordinate Gradient optimizer to craft prompts that compel LLMs to generate coherent responses from seemingly nonsensical inputs. We call these inputs LM Babel and this work systematically studies the behavior of LLMs manipulated by these prompts. We find that the manipulation efficiency depends on the target text's length and perplexity, with the Babel prompts often located in lower loss minima compared to natural prompts. We further examine the structure of the Babel prompts and evaluate their robustness. Notably, we find that guiding the model to generate harmful texts is not more difficult than into generating benign texts, suggesting lack of alignment for out-of-distribution prompts.