Africa
A Digital Twin prototype for traffic sign recognition of a learning-enabled autonomous vehicle
AbdElSalam, Mohamed, Ali, Loai, Bensalem, Saddek, He, Weicheng, Katsaros, Panagiotis, Kekatos, Nikolaos, Peled, Doron, Temperekidis, Anastasios, Wu, Changshun
In this paper, we present a novel digital twin prototype for a learning-enabled self-driving vehicle. The primary objective of this digital twin is to perform traffic sign recognition and lane keeping. The digital twin architecture relies on co-simulation and uses the Functional Mock-up Interface and SystemC Transaction Level Modeling standards. The digital twin consists of four clients, i) a vehicle model that is designed in Amesim tool, ii) an environment model developed in Prescan, iii) a lane-keeping controller designed in Robot Operating System, and iv) a perception and speed control module developed in the formal modeling language of BIP (Behavior, Interaction, Priority). These clients interface with the digital twin platform, PAVE360-Veloce System Interconnect (PAVE360-VSI). PAVE360-VSI acts as the co-simulation orchestrator and is responsible for synchronization, interconnection, and data exchange through a server. The server establishes connections among the different clients and also ensures adherence to the Ethernet protocol. We conclude with illustrative digital twin simulations and recommendations for future work.
Polynomial Semantics of Tractable Probabilistic Circuits
Broadrick, Oliver, Zhang, Honghua, Broeck, Guy Van den
Probabilistic circuits compute multilinear polynomials that represent probability distributions. They are tractable models that support efficient marginal inference. However, various polynomial semantics have been considered in the literature (e.g., network polynomials, likelihood polynomials, generating functions, Fourier transforms, and characteristic polynomials). The relationships between these polynomial encodings of distributions is largely unknown. In this paper, we prove that for binary distributions, each of these probabilistic circuit models is equivalent in the sense that any circuit for one of them can be transformed into a circuit for any of the others with only a polynomial increase in size. They are therefore all tractable for marginal inference on the same class of distributions. Finally, we explore the natural extension of one such polynomial semantics, called probabilistic generating circuits, to categorical random variables, and establish that marginal inference becomes #P-hard.
Solid Waste Detection in Remote Sensing Images: A Survey
Fraternali, Piero, Morandini, Luca, González, Sergio Luis Herrera
The detection and characterization of illegal solid waste disposal sites are essential for environmental protection, particularly for mitigating pollution and health hazards. Improperly managed landfills contaminate soil and groundwater via rainwater infiltration, posing threats to both animals and humans. Traditional landfill identification approaches, such as on-site inspections, are time-consuming and expensive. Remote sensing is a cost-effective solution for the identification and monitoring of solid waste disposal sites that enables broad coverage and repeated acquisitions over time. Earth Observation (EO) satellites, equipped with an array of sensors and imaging capabilities, have been providing high-resolution data for several decades. Researchers proposed specialized techniques that leverage remote sensing imagery to perform a range of tasks such as waste site detection, dumping site monitoring, and assessment of suitable locations for new landfills. This review aims to provide a detailed illustration of the most relevant proposals for the detection and monitoring of solid waste sites by describing and comparing the approaches, the implemented techniques, and the employed data. Furthermore, since the data sources are of the utmost importance for developing an effective solid waste detection model, a comprehensive overview of the satellites and publicly available data sets is presented. Finally, this paper identifies the open issues in the state-of-the-art and discusses the relevant research directions for reducing the costs and improving the effectiveness of novel solid waste detection methods.
AgentLens: Visual Analysis for Agent Behaviors in LLM-based Autonomous Systems
Lu, Jiaying, Pan, Bo, Chen, Jieyi, Feng, Yingchaojie, Hu, Jingyuan, Peng, Yuchen, Chen, Wei
Recently, Large Language Model based Autonomous system(LLMAS) has gained great popularity for its potential to simulate complicated behaviors of human societies. One of its main challenges is to present and analyze the dynamic events evolution of LLMAS. In this work, we present a visualization approach to explore detailed statuses and agents' behavior within LLMAS. We propose a general pipeline that establishes a behavior structure from raw LLMAS execution events, leverages a behavior summarization algorithm to construct a hierarchical summary of the entire structure in terms of time sequence, and a cause trace method to mine the causal relationship between agent behaviors. We then develop AgentLens, a visual analysis system that leverages a hierarchical temporal visualization for illustrating the evolution of LLMAS, and supports users to interactively investigate details and causes of agents' behaviors. Two usage scenarios and a user study demonstrate the effectiveness and usability of our AgentLens.
Research and application of Transformer based anomaly detection model: A literature review
Ma, Mingrui, Han, Lansheng, Zhou, Chunjie
Transformer, as one of the most advanced neural network models in Natural Language Processing (NLP), exhibits diverse applications in the field of anomaly detection. To inspire research on Transformer-based anomaly detection, this review offers a fresh perspective on the concept of anomaly detection. We explore the current challenges of anomaly detection and provide detailed insights into the operating principles of Transformer and its variants in anomaly detection tasks. Additionally, we delineate various application scenarios for Transformer-based anomaly detection models and discuss the datasets and evaluation metrics employed. Furthermore, this review highlights the key challenges in Transformer-based anomaly detection research and conducts a comprehensive analysis of future research trends in this domain. The review includes an extensive compilation of over 100 core references related to Transformer-based anomaly detection. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first comprehensive review that focuses on the research related to Transformer in the context of anomaly detection. We hope that this paper can provide detailed technical information to researchers interested in Transformer-based anomaly detection tasks.
Learning Interpretable Concepts: Unifying Causal Representation Learning and Foundation Models
Rajendran, Goutham, Buchholz, Simon, Aragam, Bryon, Schölkopf, Bernhard, Ravikumar, Pradeep
A key goal of modern machine learning is to learn representations of complex data that are humaninterpretable and can be controlled. This goal is of paramount importance given the breadth and importance of ML in today's world. There seem to be two broad approaches toward such intelligent systems. The first approach is to build models that are inherently interpretable and then subsequently focus on how to extract maximum performance from them; and the second approach is to build highperformance neural models, and then subsequently invest efforts to understand the inner workings of such models. A prominent example of the first camp is the field of Causal Representation Learning (CRL) [82, 81].
NeuRes: Learning Proofs of Propositional Satisfiability
Ghanem, Mohamed, Schmitt, Frederik, Siber, Julian, Finkbeiner, Bernd
We introduce NeuRes, a neuro-symbolic proof-based SAT solver. Unlike other neural SAT solving methods, NeuRes is capable of proving unsatisfiability as opposed to merely predicting it. By design, NeuRes operates in a certificate-driven fashion by employing propositional resolution to prove unsatisfiability and to accelerate the process of finding satisfying truth assignments in case of unsat and sat formulas, respectively. To realize this, we propose a novel architecture that adapts elements from Graph Neural Networks and Pointer Networks to autoregressively select pairs of nodes from a dynamic graph structure, which is essential to the generation of resolution proofs. Our model is trained and evaluated on a dataset of teacher proofs and truth assignments that we compiled with the same random formula distribution used by NeuroSAT. In our experiments, we show that NeuRes solves more test formulas than NeuroSAT by a rather wide margin on different distributions while being much more data-efficient. Furthermore, we show that NeuRes is capable of largely shortening teacher proofs by notable proportions. We use this feature to devise a bootstrapped training procedure that manages to reduce a dataset of proofs generated by an advanced solver by ~23% after training on it with no extra guidance.
Leveraging cough sounds to optimize chest x-ray usage in low-resource settings
Philip, Alexander, Chawla, Sanya, Jover, Lola, Kafentzis, George P., Brew, Joe, Saraf, Vishakh, Vijayan, Shibu, Small, Peter, Chaccour, Carlos
Chest X-ray is a commonly used tool during triage, diagnosis and management of respiratory diseases. In resource-constricted settings, optimizing this resource can lead to valuable cost savings for the health care system and the patients as well as to and improvement in consult time. We used prospectively-collected data from 137 patients referred for chest X-ray at the Christian Medical Center and Hospital (CMCH) in Purnia, Bihar, India. Each patient provided at least five coughs while awaiting radiography. Collected cough sounds were analyzed using acoustic AI methods. Cross-validation was done on temporal and spectral features on the cough sounds of each patient. Features were summarized using standard statistical approaches. Three models were developed, tested and compared in their capacity to predict an abnormal result in the chest X-ray. All three methods yielded models that could discriminate to some extent between normal and abnormal with the logistic regression performing best with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curves ranging from 0.7 to 0.78. Despite limitations and its relatively small sample size, this study shows that AI-enabled algorithms can use cough sounds to predict which individuals presenting for chest radiographic examination will have a normal or abnormal results. These results call for expanding this research given the potential optimization of limited health care resources in low- and middle-income countries.
JAMDEC: Unsupervised Authorship Obfuscation using Constrained Decoding over Small Language Models
Fisher, Jillian, Lu, Ximing, Jung, Jaehun, Jiang, Liwei, Harchaoui, Zaid, Choi, Yejin
The permanence of online content combined with the enhanced authorship identification techniques calls for stronger computational methods to protect the identity and privacy of online authorship when needed, e.g., blind reviews for scientific papers, anonymous online reviews, or anonymous interactions in the mental health forums. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised inference-time approach to authorship obfuscation to address the unique challenges of authorship obfuscation: lack of supervision data for diverse authorship and domains, and the need for a sufficient level of revision beyond simple paraphrasing to obfuscate the authorship, all the while preserving the original content and fluency. We introduce JAMDEC, a user-controlled, inference-time algorithm for authorship obfuscation that can be in principle applied to any text and authorship. Our approach builds on small language models such as GPT2-XL in order to help avoid disclosing the original content to proprietary LLM's APIs, while also reducing the performance gap between small and large language models via algorithmic enhancement. The key idea behind our approach is to boost the creative power of smaller language models through constrained decoding, while also allowing for user-specified controls and flexibility. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach based on GPT2-XL outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods based on comparably small models, while performing competitively against GPT3.5 175B, a propriety model that is two orders of magnitudes larger.
Bayesian Strategic Classification
Cohen, Lee, Sharifi-Malvajerdi, Saeed, Stangl, Kevin, Vakilian, Ali, Ziani, Juba
In strategic classification, agents modify their features, at a cost, to ideally obtain a positive classification from the learner's classifier. The typical response of the learner is to carefully modify their classifier to be robust to such strategic behavior. When reasoning about agent manipulations, most papers that study strategic classification rely on the following strong assumption: agents fully know the exact parameters of the deployed classifier by the learner. This often is an unrealistic assumption when using complex or proprietary machine learning techniques in real-world prediction tasks. We initiate the study of partial information release by the learner in strategic classification. We move away from the traditional assumption that agents have full knowledge of the classifier. Instead, we consider agents that have a common distributional prior on which classifier the learner is using. The learner in our model can reveal truthful, yet not necessarily complete, information about the deployed classifier to the agents. The learner's goal is to release just enough information about the classifier to maximize accuracy. We show how such partial information release can, counter-intuitively, benefit the learner's accuracy, despite increasing agents' abilities to manipulate. We show that while it is intractable to compute the best response of an agent in the general case, there exist oracle-efficient algorithms that can solve the best response of the agents when the learner's hypothesis class is the class of linear classifiers, or when the agents' cost function satisfies a natural notion of submodularity as we define. We then turn our attention to the learner's optimization problem and provide both positive and negative results on the algorithmic problem of how much information the learner should release about the classifier to maximize their expected accuracy.