Africa
SEOpinion: Summarization and Exploration Opinion of E-Commerce Websites
Mabrouk, Alhassan, Díaz-Redondo, Rebeca P., Kayed, Mohammed
E-Commerce (EC) websites provide a large amount of useful information that exceed human cognitive processing ability. In order to help customers in comparing alternatives when buying a product, previous studies designed opinion summarization systems based on customer reviews. They ignored templates' information provided by manufacturers, although these descriptive information have much product aspects or characteristics. Therefore, this paper proposes a methodology coined as SEOpinion (Summa-rization and Exploration of Opinions) which provides a summary for the product aspects and spots opinion(s) regarding them, using a combination of templates' information with the customer reviews in two main phases. First, the Hierarchical Aspect Extraction (HAE) phase creates a hierarchy of product aspects from the template. Subsequently, the Hierarchical Aspect-based Opinion Summarization (HAOS) phase enriches this hierarchy with customers' opinions; to be shown to other potential buyers. To test the feasibility of using Deep Learning-based BERT techniques with our approach, we have created a corpus by gathering information from the top five EC websites for laptops. The experimental results show that Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) achieves better results (77.4% and 82.6% in terms of F1-measure for the first and second phase) than the Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and the Support Vector Machine (SVM) technique.
Maatphor: Automated Variant Analysis for Prompt Injection Attacks
Salem, Ahmed, Paverd, Andrew, Köpf, Boris
Prompt injection has emerged as a serious security threat to large language models (LLMs). At present, the current best-practice for defending against newly-discovered prompt injection techniques is to add additional guardrails to the system (e.g., by updating the system prompt or using classifiers on the input and/or output of the model.) However, in the same way that variants of a piece of malware are created to evade anti-virus software, variants of a prompt injection can be created to evade the LLM's guardrails. Ideally, when a new prompt injection technique is discovered, candidate defenses should be tested not only against the successful prompt injection, but also against possible variants. In this work, we present, a tool to assist defenders in performing automated variant analysis of known prompt injection attacks. This involves solving two main challenges: (1) automatically generating variants of a given prompt according, and (2) automatically determining whether a variant was effective based only on the output of the model. This tool can also assist in generating datasets for jailbreak and prompt injection attacks, thus overcoming the scarcity of data in this domain. We evaluate Maatphor on three different types of prompt injection tasks. Starting from an ineffective (0%) seed prompt, Maatphor consistently generates variants that are at least 60% effective within the first 40 iterations.
Principled Weight Initialization for Hypernetworks
Chang, Oscar, Flokas, Lampros, Lipson, Hod
Hypernetworks are meta neural networks that generate weights for a main neural network in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Despite extensive applications ranging from multi-task learning to Bayesian deep learning, the problem of optimizing hypernetworks has not been studied to date. We observe that classical weight initialization methods like Glorot & Bengio (2010) and He et al. (2015), when applied directly on a hypernet, fail to produce weights for the mainnet in the correct scale. We develop principled techniques for weight initialization in hypernets, and show that they lead to more stable mainnet weights, lower training loss, and faster convergence. Meta-learning describes a broad family of techniques in machine learning that deals with the problem of learning to learn. An emerging branch of meta-learning involves the use of hypernetworks, which are meta neural networks that generate the weights of a main neural network to solve a given task in an end-to-end differentiable manner. Hypernetworks were originally introduced by Ha et al. (2016) as a way to induce weight-sharing and achieve model compression by training the same meta network to learn the weights belonging to different layers in the main network.
Multi-criteria recommendation systems to foster online grocery
Hafez, Manar Mohamed, Redondo, Rebeca P. Díaz, Fernández-Vilas, Ana, Pazó, Héctor Olivera
With the exponential increase in information, it has become imperative to design mechanisms that allow users to access what matters to them as quickly as possible. The recommendation system ($RS$) with information technology development is the solution, it is an intelligent system. Various types of data can be collected on items of interest to users and presented as recommendations. $RS$ also play a very important role in e-commerce. The purpose of recommending a product is to designate the most appropriate designation for a specific product. The major challenges when recommending products are insufficient information about the products and the categories to which they belong. In this paper, we transform the product data using two methods of document representation: bag-of-words (BOW) and the neural network-based document combination known as vector-based (Doc2Vec). We propose three-criteria recommendation systems (product, package, and health) for each document representation method to foster online grocery, which depends on product characteristics such as (composition, packaging, nutrition table, allergen, etc.). For our evaluation, we conducted a user and expert survey. Finally, we have compared the performance of these three criteria for each document representation method, discovering that the neural network-based (Doc2Vec) performs better and completely alters the results.
Taking it further: leveraging pseudo labels for field delineation across label-scarce smallholder regions
Rufin, Philippe, Wang, Sherrie, Lisboa, Sá Nogueira, Hemmerling, Jan, Tulbure, Mirela G., Meyfroidt, Patrick
Transfer learning allows for resource-efficient geographic transfer of pre-trained field delineation models. However, the scarcity of labeled data for complex and dynamic smallholder landscapes, particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, remains a major bottleneck for large-area field delineation. This study explores opportunities of using sparse field delineation pseudo labels for fine-tuning models across geographies and sensor characteristics. We build on a FracTAL ResUNet trained for crop field delineation in India (median field size of 0.24 ha) and use this pre-trained model to generate pseudo labels in Mozambique (median field size of 0.06 ha). We designed multiple pseudo label selection strategies and compared the quantities, area properties, seasonal distribution, and spatial agreement of the pseudo labels against human-annotated training labels (n = 1,512). We then used the human-annotated labels and the pseudo labels for model fine-tuning and compared predictions against human field annotations (n = 2,199). Our results indicate i) a good baseline performance of the pre-trained model in both field delineation and field size estimation, and ii) the added value of regional fine-tuning with performance improvements in nearly all experiments. Moreover, we found iii) substantial performance increases when using only pseudo labels (up to 77% of the IoU increases and 68% of the RMSE decreases obtained by human labels), and iv) additional performance increases when complementing human annotations with pseudo labels. Pseudo labels can be efficiently generated at scale and thus facilitate domain adaptation in label-scarce settings. The workflow presented here is a stepping stone for overcoming the persisting data gaps in heterogeneous smallholder agriculture of Sub-Saharan Africa, where labels are commonly scarce.
Stable Rivers: A Case Study in the Application of Text-to-Image Generative Models for Earth Sciences
Kupferschmidt, C, Binns, A. D., Kupferschmidt, K. L., Taylor, G. W
Text-to-image (TTI) generative models can be used to generate photorealistic images from a given text-string input. These models offer great potential to mitigate challenges to the uptake of machine learning in the earth sciences. However, the rapid increase in their use has raised questions about fairness and biases, with most research to-date focusing on social and cultural areas rather than domain-specific considerations. We conducted a case study for the earth sciences, focusing on the field of fluvial geomorphology, where we evaluated subject-area specific biases in the training data and downstream model performance of Stable Diffusion (v1.5). In addition to perpetuating Western biases, we found that the training data over-represented scenic locations, such as famous rivers and waterfalls, and showed serious under- and over-representation of many morphological and environmental terms. Despite biased training data, we found that with careful prompting, the Stable Diffusion model was able to generate photorealistic synthetic river images reproducing many important environmental and morphological characteristics. Furthermore, conditional control techniques, such as the use of condition maps with ControlNet were effective for providing additional constraints on output images. Despite great potential for the use of TTI models in the earth sciences field, we advocate for caution in sensitive applications, and advocate for domain-specific reviews of training data and image generation biases to mitigate perpetuation of existing biases.
Sentiment analysis in Tourism: Fine-tuning BERT or sentence embeddings concatenation?
Bouabdallaoui, Ibrahim, Guerouate, Fatima, Bouhaddour, Samya, Saadi, Chaimae, Sbihi, Mohammed
Undoubtedly that the Bidirectional Encoder representations from Transformers is the most powerful technique in making Natural Language Processing tasks such as Named Entity Recognition, Question & Answers or Sentiment Analysis, however, the use of traditional techniques remains a major potential for the improvement of recent models, in particular word tokenization techniques and embeddings, but also the improvement of neural network architectures which are now the core of each architecture. recent. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study between Fine-Tuning the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers and a method of concatenating two embeddings to boost the performance of a stacked Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory-Bidirectional Gated Recurrent Units model; these two approaches are applied in the context of sentiment analysis of shopping places in Morocco. A search for the best learning rate was made at the level of the two approaches, and a comparison of the best optimizers was made for each sentence embedding combination with regard to the second approach.
Tell, don't show: Declarative facts influence how LLMs generalize
Meinke, Alexander, Evans, Owain
We examine how large language models (LLMs) generalize from abstract declarative statements in their training data. As an illustration, consider an LLM that is prompted to generate weather reports for London in 2050. One possibility is that the temperatures in the reports match the mean and variance of reports from 2023 (i.e. Another possibility is that the reports predict higher temperatures, by incorporating declarative statements about climate change from scientific papers written in 2023. An example of such a declarative statement is "global temperatures will increase by 1 To test the influence of abstract declarative statements, we construct tasks in which LLMs are finetuned on both declarative and procedural information. We find that declarative statements influence model predictions, even when they conflict with procedural information. In particular, finetuning on a declarative statement S increases the model likelihood for logical consequences of S. The effect of declarative statements is consistent across three domains: aligning an AI assistant, predicting weather, and predicting demographic features. Through a series of ablations, we show that the effect of declarative statements cannot be explained by associative learning based on matching keywords. Nevertheless, the effect of declarative statements on model likelihoods is small in absolute terms and increases surprisingly little with model size (i.e. from 330 million to 175 billion parameters). We argue that these results have implications for AI risk (in relation to the "treacherous turn") and for fairness. Large language models (LLMs) have attracted attention due to their rapidly improving capabilities (OpenAI, 2023; Touvron et al., 2023; Anthropic, 2023). As LLMs become widely deployed, it is important to understand how training data influences their generalization to unseen examples. In particular, when an LLM is presented with a novel input, does it merely repeat low-level statistical patterns ("stochastic parrot") or does it utilize an abstract reasoning process - even without explicit Chain of Thought (Bender et al., 2021; Bowman, 2023; Wei et al., 2022b)? Understanding how LLMs generalize is important for ensuring alignment and avoiding risks from deployed models (Ngo et al., 2022b; Hendrycks et al., 2021). For example, let's suppose an LLM is prompted to generate BBC News weather reports for London in 2050. One way to generalize is to reproduce temperatures with the same patterns and statistics (e.g. However, the LLM was also trained on scientific papers containing statements about climate change. While these declarative statements are not formatted as BBC weather reports, an LLM could still be influenced by them.
Teaching Unknown Objects by Leveraging Human Gaze and Augmented Reality in Human-Robot Interaction
Robots are becoming increasingly popular in a wide range of environments due to their exceptional work capacity, precision, efficiency, and scalability. This development has been further encouraged by advances in Artificial Intelligence, particularly Machine Learning. By employing sophisticated neural networks, robots are given the ability to detect and interact with objects in their vicinity. However, a significant drawback arises from the underlying dependency on extensive datasets and the availability of substantial amounts of training data for these object detection models. This issue becomes particularly problematic when the specific deployment location of the robot and the surroundings, are not known in advance. The vast and ever-expanding array of objects makes it virtually impossible to comprehensively cover the entire spectrum of existing objects using preexisting datasets alone. The goal of this dissertation was to teach a robot unknown objects in the context of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) in order to liberate it from its data dependency, unleashing it from predefined scenarios. In this context, the combination of eye tracking and Augmented Reality created a powerful synergy that empowered the human teacher to communicate with the robot and effortlessly point out objects by means of human gaze. This holistic approach led to the development of a multimodal HRI system that enabled the robot to identify and visually segment the Objects of Interest in 3D space. Through the class information provided by the human, the robot was able to learn the objects and redetect them at a later stage. Due to the knowledge gained from this HRI based teaching, the robot's object detection capabilities exhibited comparable performance to state-of-the-art object detectors trained on extensive datasets, without being restricted to predefined classes, showcasing its versatility and adaptability.
Privacy-Aware Energy Consumption Modeling of Connected Battery Electric Vehicles using Federated Learning
Yan, Sen, Fang, Hongyuan, Li, Ji, Ward, Tomas, O'Connor, Noel, Liu, Mingming
Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) are increasingly significant in modern cities due to their potential to reduce air pollution. Precise and real-time estimation of energy consumption for them is imperative for effective itinerary planning and optimizing vehicle systems, which can reduce driving range anxiety and decrease energy costs. As public awareness of data privacy increases, adopting approaches that safeguard data privacy in the context of BEV energy consumption modeling is crucial. Federated Learning (FL) is a promising solution mitigating the risk of exposing sensitive information to third parties by allowing local data to remain on devices and only sharing model updates with a central server. Our work investigates the potential of using FL methods, such as FedAvg, and FedPer, to improve BEV energy consumption prediction while maintaining user privacy. We conducted experiments using data from 10 BEVs under simulated real-world driving conditions. Our results demonstrate that the FedAvg-LSTM model achieved a reduction of up to 67.84\% in the MAE value of the prediction results. Furthermore, we explored various real-world scenarios and discussed how FL methods can be employed in those cases. Our findings show that FL methods can effectively improve the performance of BEV energy consumption prediction while maintaining user privacy.