Africa
Monitoring the evolution of antisemitic discourse on extremist social media using BERT
Mustafa, Raza Ul, Japkowicz, Nathalie
Racism and intolerance on social media contribute to a toxic online environment which may spill offline to foster hatred, and eventually lead to physical violence. That is the case with online antisemitism, the specific category of hatred considered in this study. Tracking antisemitic themes and their associated terminology over time in online discussions could help monitor the sentiments of their participants and their evolution, and possibly offer avenues for intervention that may prevent the escalation of hatred. Due to the large volume and constant evolution of online traffic, monitoring conversations manually is impractical. Instead, we propose an automated method that extracts antisemitic themes and terminology from extremist social media over time and captures their evolution. Since supervised learning would be too limited for such a task, we created an unsupervised online machine learning approach that uses large language models to assess the contextual similarity of posts. The method clusters similar posts together, dividing, and creating additional clusters over time when sub-themes emerge from existing ones or new themes appear. The antisemitic terminology used within each theme is extracted from the posts in each cluster. Our experiments show that our methodology outperforms existing baselines and demonstrates the kind of themes and sub-themes it discovers within antisemitic discourse along with their associated terminology. We believe that our approach will be useful for monitoring the evolution of all kinds of hatred beyond antisemitism on social platforms.
Unmasking the Shadows of AI: Investigating Deceptive Capabilities in Large Language Models
This research critically navigates the intricate landscape of AI deception, concentrating on deceptive behaviours of Large Language Models (LLMs). My objective is to elucidate this issue, examine the discourse surrounding it, and subsequently delve into its categorization and ramifications. The essay initiates with an evaluation of the AI Safety Summit 2023 (ASS) and introduction of LLMs, emphasising multidimensional biases that underlie their deceptive behaviours.The literature review covers four types of deception categorised: Strategic deception, Imitation, Sycophancy, and Unfaithful Reasoning, along with the social implications and risks they entail. Lastly, I take an evaluative stance on various aspects related to navigating the persistent challenges of the deceptive AI. This encompasses considerations of international collaborative governance, the reconfigured engagement of individuals with AI, proposal of practical adjustments, and specific elements of digital education.
Measuring machine learning harms from stereotypes: requires understanding who is being harmed by which errors in what ways
Wang, Angelina, Bai, Xuechunzi, Barocas, Solon, Blodgett, Su Lin
As machine learning applications proliferate, we need an understanding of their potential for harm. However, current fairness metrics are rarely grounded in human psychological experiences of harm. Drawing on the social psychology of stereotypes, we use a case study of gender stereotypes in image search to examine how people react to machine learning errors. First, we use survey studies to show that not all machine learning errors reflect stereotypes nor are equally harmful. Then, in experimental studies we randomly expose participants to stereotype-reinforcing, -violating, and -neutral machine learning errors. We find stereotype-reinforcing errors induce more experientially (i.e., subjectively) harmful experiences, while having minimal changes to cognitive beliefs, attitudes, or behaviors. This experiential harm impacts women more than men. However, certain stereotype-violating errors are more experientially harmful for men, potentially due to perceived threats to masculinity. We conclude that harm cannot be the sole guide in fairness mitigation, and propose a nuanced perspective depending on who is experiencing what harm and why.
Tensor Completion via Integer Optimization
Chen, Xin, Kudva, Sukanya, Dai, Yongzheng, Aswani, Anil, Chen, Chen
The main challenge with the tensor completion problem is a fundamental tension between computation power and the information-theoretic sample complexity rate. Past approaches either achieve the information-theoretic rate but lack practical algorithms to compute the corresponding solution, or have polynomial-time algorithms that require an exponentially-larger number of samples for low estimation error. This paper develops a novel tensor completion algorithm that resolves this tension by achieving both provable convergence (in numerical tolerance) in a linear number of oracle steps and the information-theoretic rate. Our approach formulates tensor completion as a convex optimization problem constrained using a gauge-based tensor norm, which is defined in a way that allows the use of integer linear optimization to solve linear separation problems over the unit-ball in this new norm. Adaptations based on this insight are incorporated into a Frank-Wolfe variant to build our algorithm. We show our algorithm scales-well using numerical experiments on tensors with up to ten million entries.
Ten Hard Problems in Artificial Intelligence We Must Get Right
Leech, Gavin, Garfinkel, Simson, Yagudin, Misha, Briand, Alexander, Zhuravlev, Aleksandr
We explore the AI2050 "hard problems" that block the promise of AI and cause AI risks: (1) developing general capabilities of the systems; (2) assuring the performance of AI systems and their training processes; (3) aligning system goals with human goals; (4) enabling great applications of AI in real life; (5) addressing economic disruptions; (6) ensuring the participation of all; (7) at the same time ensuring socially responsible deployment; (8) addressing any geopolitical disruptions that AI causes; (9) promoting sound governance of the technology; and (10) managing the philosophical disruptions for humans living in the age of AI. For each problem, we outline the area, identify significant recent work, and suggest ways forward. [Note: this paper reviews literature through January 2023.]
Studying Vulnerable Code Entities in R
Zhao, Zixiao, Das, Millon Madhur, Fard, Fatemeh H.
Pre-trained Code Language Models (Code-PLMs) have shown many advancements and achieved state-of-the-art results for many software engineering tasks in the past few years. These models are mainly targeted for popular programming languages such as Java and Python, leaving out many other ones like R. Though R has a wide community of developers and users, there is little known about the applicability of Code-PLMs for R. In this preliminary study, we aim to investigate the vulnerability of Code-PLMs for code entities in R. For this purpose, we use an R dataset of code and comment pairs and then apply CodeAttack, a black-box attack model that uses the structure of code to generate adversarial code samples. We investigate how the model can attack different entities in R. This is the first step towards understanding the importance of R token types, compared to popular programming languages (e.g., Java). We limit our study to code summarization. Our results show that the most vulnerable code entity is the identifier, followed by some syntax tokens specific to R. The results can shed light on the importance of token types and help in developing models for code summarization and method name prediction for the R language.
The World of Generative AI: Deepfakes and Large Language Models
Mitra, Alakananda, Mohanty, Saraju P., Kougianos, Elias
The latest development in artificial intelligence (AI), chatbots, the product of generative AI, has captivated the public in the last two years. But it similarly poses an unprecedented challenge and can have potentially unwanted effects on our lives. OpenAI released the chatbot ChatGPT on November 30, 2022. The overwhelming response of the public towards ChatGPT usage pushed Google to release Bard, ChatGPT's rival, and Microsoft to release AI-powered Bing. But the recent GPT-4 topped the list as it has more capabilities than any other existing chatbot. Being LLM-based, these chatbots create synthetic media with the intention of creating better content, enhanced quality, or professional voices. The capabilities of such chatbots raise questions on the ethical use of AI. In the meantime, deepfakes, which are high-quality AI-generated fake videos, have been circulating online. Synthetically generated deepfake videos have exceeded acceptable limits in terms of reality distortion.
Carthago Delenda Est: Co-opetitive Indirect Information Diffusion Model for Influence Operations on Online Social Media
Low, Jwen Fai, Fung, Benjamin C. M., Iqbal, Farkhund, Fachkha, Claude
Planning and/or defending against decentralized info ops can be aided by computational simulations in lieu of ethically-fraught live experiments on social media. In this study, we introduce Diluvsion, an agent-based model for contested information propagation efforts on Twitter-like social media. The model emphasizes a user's belief in an opinion (stance) being impacted by the perception of potentially illusory popular support from constant incoming floods of indirect information, floods that can be cooperatively engineered in an uncoordinated manner by bots as they compete to spread their stances. Our model, which has been validated against real-world data, is an advancement over previous models because we account for engagement metrics in influencing stance adoption, non-social tie spreading of information, neutrality as a stance that can be spread, and themes that are analogous to media's framing effect and are symbiotic with respect to stance propagation. The strengths of the Diluvsion model are demonstrated in simulations of orthodox info ops, e.g., maximizing adoption of one stance; creating echo chambers; inducing polarization; and unorthodox info ops, e.g., simultaneous support of multiple stances as a Trojan horse tactic for the dissemination of a theme.
CFTM: Continuous time fractional topic model
Nakagawa, Kei, Hayashi, Kohei, Fujimoto, Yugo
In this paper, we propose the Continuous Time Fractional Topic Model (cFTM), a new method for dynamic topic modeling. This approach incorporates fractional Brownian motion~(fBm) to effectively identify positive or negative correlations in topic and word distribution over time, revealing long-term dependency or roughness. Our theoretical analysis shows that the cFTM can capture these long-term dependency or roughness in both topic and word distributions, mirroring the main characteristics of fBm. Moreover, we prove that the parameter estimation process for the cFTM is on par with that of LDA, traditional topic models. To demonstrate the cFTM's property, we conduct empirical study using economic news articles. The results from these tests support the model's ability to identify and track long-term dependency or roughness in topics over time.
Generative AI for Education (GAIED): Advances, Opportunities, and Challenges
Denny, Paul, Gulwani, Sumit, Heffernan, Neil T., Käser, Tanja, Moore, Steven, Rafferty, Anna N., Singla, Adish
This survey article has grown out of the GAIED (pronounced "guide") workshop organized by the authors at the NeurIPS 2023 conference. We organized the GAIED workshop as part of a community-building effort to bring together researchers, educators, and practitioners to explore the potential of generative AI for enhancing education. This article aims to provide an overview of the workshop activities and highlight several future research directions in the area of GAIED.