Africa
Incremental XAI: Memorable Understanding of AI with Incremental Explanations
Bo, Jessica Y., Hao, Pan, Lim, Brian Y.
Many explainable AI (XAI) techniques strive for interpretability by providing concise salient information, such as sparse linear factors. However, users either only see inaccurate global explanations, or highly-varying local explanations. We propose to provide more detailed explanations by leveraging the human cognitive capacity to accumulate knowledge by incrementally receiving more details. Focusing on linear factor explanations (factors $\times$ values = outcome), we introduce Incremental XAI to automatically partition explanations for general and atypical instances by providing Base + Incremental factors to help users read and remember more faithful explanations. Memorability is improved by reusing base factors and reducing the number of factors shown in atypical cases. In modeling, formative, and summative user studies, we evaluated the faithfulness, memorability and understandability of Incremental XAI against baseline explanation methods. This work contributes towards more usable explanation that users can better ingrain to facilitate intuitive engagement with AI.
Racial/Ethnic Categories in AI and Algorithmic Fairness: Why They Matter and What They Represent
Racial diversity has become increasingly discussed within the AI The utilization of racial and ethnic categories in the development and algorithmic fairness literature, yet little attention is focused on of datasets and models facilitates the inclusion and documentation justifying the choices of racial categories and understanding how of diverse perspectives. Racial and ethnic categories are especially people are racialized into these chosen racial categories. Even less crucial for datasets and models in which race and ethnicity attention is given to how racial categories shift and how the racialization serve as relevant factors, may act as confounding variables, or enable process changes depending on the context of a dataset or the ability to audit for fairness using race and ethnicity for model. An unclear understanding of who comprises the racial categories fairness purposes. For example, understanding the racial and/or chosen and how people are racialized into these categories ethnic target of hate speech is crucial for understanding the impact can lead to varying interpretations of these categories. These varying of hate speech, as hate speech can differ based on the race interpretations can lead to harm when the understanding of and/or ethnicity of the target[48]. Similarly, in health, race is correlated racial categories and the racialization process is misaligned from with health outcomes[6], and knowledge of a patient's race the actual racialization process and racial categories used. Harm and ethnicity can help contextualize the patient's experience and can also arise if the racialization process and racial categories used health history[53]. In algorithmic fairness settings, knowledge of are irrelevant ordonot exist inthecontext they areapplied.
TrajPRed: Trajectory Prediction with Region-based Relation Learning
Zhou, Chen, AlRegib, Ghassan, Parchami, Armin, Singh, Kunjan
Forecasting human trajectories in traffic scenes is critical for safety within mixed or fully autonomous systems. Human future trajectories are driven by two major stimuli, social interactions, and stochastic goals. Thus, reliable forecasting needs to capture these two stimuli. Edge-based relation modeling represents social interactions using pairwise correlations from precise individual states. Nevertheless, edge-based relations can be vulnerable under perturbations. To alleviate these issues, we propose a region-based relation learning paradigm that models social interactions via region-wise dynamics of joint states, i.e., the changes in the density of crowds. In particular, region-wise agent joint information is encoded within convolutional feature grids. Social relations are modeled by relating the temporal changes of local joint information from a global perspective. We show that region-based relations are less susceptible to perturbations. In order to account for the stochastic individual goals, we exploit a conditional variational autoencoder to realize multi-goal estimation and diverse future prediction. Specifically, we perform variational inference via the latent distribution, which is conditioned on the correlation between input states and associated target goals. Sampling from the latent distribution enables the framework to reliably capture the stochastic behavior in test data. We integrate multi-goal estimation and region-based relation learning to model the two stimuli, social interactions, and stochastic goals, in a prediction framework. We evaluate our framework on the ETH-UCY dataset and Stanford Drone Dataset (SDD). We show that the diverse prediction better fits the ground truth when incorporating the relation module. Our framework outperforms the state-of-the-art models on SDD by $27.61\%$/$18.20\%$ of ADE/FDE metrics.
Control-DAG: Constrained Decoding for Non-Autoregressive Directed Acyclic T5 using Weighted Finite State Automata
Chen, Jinghong, Lin, Weizhe, Mei, Jingbiao, Byrne, Bill
The Directed Acyclic Transformer is a fast non-autoregressive (NAR) model that performs well in Neural Machine Translation. Two issues prevent its application to general Natural Language Generation (NLG) tasks: frequent Out-Of-Vocabulary (OOV) errors and the inability to faithfully generate entity names. We introduce Control-DAG, a constrained decoding algorithm for our Directed Acyclic T5 (DA-T5) model which offers lexical, vocabulary and length control. We show that Control-DAG significantly enhances DA-T5 on the Schema Guided Dialogue and the DART datasets, establishing strong NAR results for Task-Oriented Dialogue and Data-to-Text NLG.
A Computational Analysis of the Dehumanisation of Migrants from Syria and Ukraine in Slovene News Media
Caporusso, Jaya, Hoogland, Damar, Brglez, Mojca, Koloski, Boshko, Purver, Matthew, Pollak, Senja
Dehumanisation involves the perception and/or treatment of a social group's members as less than human. This phenomenon is rarely addressed with computational linguistic techniques. We adapt a recently proposed approach for English, making it easier to transfer to other languages and to evaluate, introducing a new sentiment resource, the use of zero-shot cross-lingual valence and arousal detection, and a new method for statistical significance testing. We then apply it to study attitudes to migration expressed in Slovene newspapers, to examine changes in the Slovene discourse on migration between the 2015-16 migration crisis following the war in Syria and the 2022-23 period following the war in Ukraine. We find that while this discourse became more negative and more intense over time, it is less dehumanising when specifically addressing Ukrainian migrants compared to others.
Are EEG Sequences Time Series? EEG Classification with Time Series Models and Joint Subject Training
Burchert, Johannes, Werner, Thorben, Yalavarthi, Vijaya Krishna, de Portugal, Diego Coello, Stubbemann, Maximilian, Schmidt-Thieme, Lars
As with most other data domains, EEG data analysis relies on rich domain-specific preprocessing. Beyond such preprocessing, machine learners would hope to deal with such data as with any other time series data. For EEG classification many models have been developed with layer types and architectures we typically do not see in time series classification. Furthermore, typically separate models for each individual subject are learned, not one model for all of them. In this paper, we systematically study the differences between EEG classification models and generic time series classification models. We describe three different model setups to deal with EEG data from different subjects, subject-specific models (most EEG literature), subject-agnostic models and subject-conditional models. In experiments on three datasets, we demonstrate that off-the-shelf time series classification models trained per subject perform close to EEG classification models, but that do not quite reach the performance of domain-specific modeling. Additionally, we combine time-series models with subject embeddings to train one joint subject-conditional classifier on all subjects. The resulting models are competitive with dedicated EEG models in 2 out of 3 datasets, even outperforming all EEG methods on one of them.
Autonomous Evaluation and Refinement of Digital Agents
Pan, Jiayi, Zhang, Yichi, Tomlin, Nicholas, Zhou, Yifei, Levine, Sergey, Suhr, Alane
We show that domain-general automatic evaluators can significantly improve the performance of agents for web navigation and device control. We experiment with multiple evaluation models that trade off between inference cost, modularity of design, and accuracy. We validate the performance of these models in several popular benchmarks for digital agents, finding between 74.4 and 92.9% agreement with oracle evaluation metrics. Finally, we use these evaluators to improve the performance of existing agents via fine-tuning and inference-time guidance. Without any additional supervision, we improve state-of-the-art performance by 29% on the popular benchmark WebArena, and achieve a 75% relative improvement in a challenging domain transfer scenario.
Learning to Predict 3D Rotational Dynamics from Images of a Rigid Body with Unknown Mass Distribution
Mason, Justice, Allen-Blanchette, Christine, Zolman, Nicholas, Davison, Elizabeth, Leonard, Naomi Ehrich
In many real-world settings, image observations of freely rotating 3D rigid bodies may be available when low-dimensional measurements are not. However, the high-dimensionality of image data precludes the use of classical estimation techniques to learn the dynamics. The usefulness of standard deep learning methods is also limited, because an image of a rigid body reveals nothing about the distribution of mass inside the body, which, together with initial angular velocity, is what determines how the body will rotate. We present a physics-based neural network model to estimate and predict 3D rotational dynamics from image sequences. We achieve this using a multi-stage prediction pipeline that maps individual images to a latent representation homeomorphic to $\mathbf{SO}(3)$, computes angular velocities from latent pairs, and predicts future latent states using the Hamiltonian equations of motion. We demonstrate the efficacy of our approach on new rotating rigid-body datasets of sequences of synthetic images of rotating objects, including cubes, prisms and satellites, with unknown uniform and non-uniform mass distributions. Our model outperforms competing baselines on our datasets, producing better qualitative predictions and reducing the error observed for the state-of-the-art Hamiltonian Generative Network by a factor of 2.
Transferable and Efficient Non-Factual Content Detection via Probe Training with Offline Consistency Checking
Zhang, Xiaokang, Yao, Zijun, Zhang, Jing, Yun, Kaifeng, Yu, Jifan, Li, Juanzi, Tang, Jie
Detecting non-factual content is a longstanding goal to increase the trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs) generations. Current factuality probes, trained using humanannotated labels, exhibit limited transferability to out-of-distribution content, while online selfconsistency checking imposes extensive computation burden due to the necessity of generating multiple outputs. This paper proposes PINOSE, which trains a probing model on offline self-consistency checking results, thereby circumventing the need for human-annotated data and achieving transferability across diverse data distributions. As the consistency check process is offline, PINOSE reduces the computational burden of generating multiple responses by online consistency verification. Additionally, it examines various aspects of internal states prior to response decoding, contributing to more effective detection of factual inaccuracies. Experiment results on both factuality detection and question answering benchmarks show that PINOSE achieves surpassing results than existing factuality detection methods. Our code and datasets are publicly available on this anonymized repository.
Groundedness in Retrieval-augmented Long-form Generation: An Empirical Study
We present an empirical study of groundedness in long-form question answering (LFQA) by retrieval-augmented large language models (LLMs). In particular, we evaluate whether every generated sentence is grounded in the retrieved documents or the model's pre-training data. Across 3 datasets and 4 model families, our findings reveal that a significant fraction of generated sentences are consistently ungrounded, even when those sentences contain correct ground-truth answers. Additionally, we examine the impacts of factors such as model size, decoding strategy, and instruction tuning on groundedness. Our results show that while larger models tend to ground their outputs more effectively, a significant portion of correct answers remains compromised by hallucinations. This study provides novel insights into the groundedness challenges in LFQA and underscores the necessity for more robust mechanisms in LLMs to mitigate the generation of ungrounded content.