Africa
Structured, Complex and Time-complete Temporal Event Forecasting
Ma, Yunshan, Ye, Chenchen, Wu, Zijian, Wang, Xiang, Cao, Yixin, Pang, Liang, Chua, Tat-Seng
Temporal event forecasting aims to predict what will happen next given the observed events in history. Previous formulations of temporal event are unstructured, atomic, or lacking full temporal information, thus largely restricting the representation quality and forecasting ability of temporal events. To address these limitations, we introduce a novel formulation for Structured, Complex, and Time-complete Temporal Event (SCTc-TE). Based on this new formulation, we develop a simple and fully automated pipeline for constructing such SCTc-TEs from a large amount of news articles. Furthermore, we propose a novel model that leverages both Local and Global contexts for SCTc-TE forecasting, named LoGo. To evaluate our model, we construct two large-scale datasets named MidEast-TE and GDELT-TE. Extensive evaluations demonstrate the advantages of our datasets in multiple aspects, while experimental results justify the effectiveness of our forecasting model LoGo. We release the code and dataset via https://github.com/yecchen/GDELT-ComplexEvent.
Harnessing the Power of Prompt-based Techniques for Generating School-Level Questions using Large Language Models
Maity, Subhankar, Deroy, Aniket, Sarkar, Sudeshna
Designing high-quality educational questions is a challenging and time-consuming task. In this work, we propose a novel approach that utilizes prompt-based techniques to generate descriptive and reasoning-based questions. However, current question-answering (QA) datasets are inadequate for conducting our experiments on prompt-based question generation (QG) in an educational setting. Therefore, we curate a new QG dataset called EduProbe for school-level subjects, by leveraging the rich content of NCERT textbooks. We carefully annotate this dataset as quadruples of 1) Context: a segment upon which the question is formed; 2) Long Prompt: a long textual cue for the question (i.e., a longer sequence of words or phrases, covering the main theme of the context); 3) Short Prompt: a short textual cue for the question (i.e., a condensed representation of the key information or focus of the context); 4) Question: a deep question that aligns with the context and is coherent with the prompts. We investigate several prompt-based QG methods by fine-tuning pre-trained transformer-based large language models (LLMs), namely PEGASUS, T5, MBART, and BART. Moreover, we explore the performance of two general-purpose pre-trained LLMs such as Text-Davinci-003 and GPT-3.5-Turbo without any further training. By performing automatic evaluation, we show that T5 (with long prompt) outperforms all other models, but still falls short of the human baseline. Under human evaluation criteria, TextDavinci-003 usually shows better results than other models under various prompt settings. Even in the case of human evaluation criteria, QG models mostly fall short of the human baseline. Our code and dataset are available at: https://github.com/my625/PromptQG
Everybody Needs a Little HELP: Explaining Graphs via Hierarchical Concepts
Jรผrร, Jonas, Magister, Lucie Charlotte, Barbiero, Pietro, Liรฒ, Pietro, Simidjievski, Nikola
Graph neural networks (GNNs) have led to major breakthroughs in a variety of domains such as drug discovery, social network analysis, and travel time estimation. However, they lack interpretability which hinders human trust and thereby deployment to settings with high-stakes decisions. A line of interpretable methods approach this by discovering a small set of relevant concepts as subgraphs in the last GNN layer that together explain the prediction. This can yield oversimplified explanations, failing to explain the interaction between GNN layers. To address this oversight, we provide HELP (Hierarchical Explainable Latent Pooling), a novel, inherently interpretable graph pooling approach that reveals how concepts from different GNN layers compose to new ones in later steps. HELP is more than 1-WL expressive and is the first non-spectral, end-to-end-learnable, hierarchical graph pooling method that can learn to pool a variable number of arbitrary connected components. We empirically demonstrate that it performs on-par with standard GCNs and popular pooling methods in terms of accuracy while yielding explanations that are aligned with expert knowledge in the domains of chemistry and social networks. In addition to a qualitative analysis, we employ concept completeness scores as well as concept conformity, a novel metric to measure the noise in discovered concepts, quantitatively verifying that the discovered concepts are significantly easier to fully understand than those from previous work. Our work represents a first step towards an understanding of graph neural networks that goes beyond a set of concepts from the final layer and instead explains the complex interplay of concepts on different levels.
Google's new AI experiment composes abstract musical clips inspired by instruments
Google's new generative AI experiment lets you create music "inspired by" over 100 instruments worldwide. Instrument Playground starts by asking for a simple prompt containing a musical instrument's name, optionally preceded by an adjective like "upbeat," "strange" or "gloomy." It will then spit out a 20-second audio clip as a starting point to compose (often extremely offbeat or abstract) music that may or may not include the sound of the specific instrument you entered. Simon Doury, an Artist in Residence at Google Arts & Culture Lab, designed the experiment. It taps into Google's MusicLM, a text-to-AI tool it made available to the public in May.
Clustering Students According to their Academic Achievement Using Fuzzy Logic
Balovsyak, Serhiy, Derevyanchuk, Oleksandr, Kravchenko, Hanna, Ushenko, Yuriy, Hu, Zhengbing
The software for clustering students according to their educational achievements using fuzzy logic was developed in Python using the Google Colab cloud service. In the process of analyzing educational data, the problems of Data Mining are solved, since only some characteristics of the educational process are obtained from a large sample of data. Data clustering was performed using the classic K-Means method, which is characterized by simplicity and high speed. Cluster analysis was performed in the space of two features using the machine learning library scikit-learn (Python). The obtained clusters are described by fuzzy triangular membership functions, which allowed to correctly determine the membership of each student to a certain cluster. Creation of fuzzy membership functions is done using the scikit-fuzzy library. The development of fuzzy functions of objects belonging to clusters is also useful for educational purposes, as it allows a better understanding of the principles of using fuzzy logic. As a result of processing test educational data using the developed software, correct results were obtained. It is shown that the use of fuzzy membership functions makes it possible to correctly determine the belonging of students to certain clusters, even if such clusters are not clearly separated. Due to this, it is possible to more accurately determine the recommended level of difficulty of tasks for each student, depending on his previous evaluations.
Interpretable Knowledge Tracing via Response Influence-based Counterfactual Reasoning
Cui, Jiajun, Yu, Minghe, Jiang, Bo, Zhou, Aimin, Wang, Jianyong, Zhang, Wei
Knowledge tracing (KT) plays a crucial role in computer-aided education and intelligent tutoring systems, aiming to assess students' knowledge proficiency by predicting their future performance on new questions based on their past response records. While existing deep learning knowledge tracing (DLKT) methods have significantly improved prediction accuracy and achieved state-of-the-art results, they often suffer from a lack of interpretability. To address this limitation, current approaches have explored incorporating psychological influences to achieve more explainable predictions, but they tend to overlook the potential influences of historical responses. In fact, understanding how models make predictions based on response influences can enhance the transparency and trustworthiness of the knowledge tracing process, presenting an opportunity for a new paradigm of interpretable KT. However, measuring unobservable response influences is challenging. In this paper, we resort to counterfactual reasoning that intervenes in each response to answer \textit{what if a student had answered a question incorrectly that he/she actually answered correctly, and vice versa}. Based on this, we propose RCKT, a novel response influence-based counterfactual knowledge tracing framework. RCKT generates response influences by comparing prediction outcomes from factual sequences and constructed counterfactual sequences after interventions. Additionally, we introduce maximization and inference techniques to leverage accumulated influences from different past responses, further improving the model's performance and credibility. Extensive experimental results demonstrate that our RCKT method outperforms state-of-the-art knowledge tracing methods on four datasets against six baselines, and provides credible interpretations of response influences.
HyperAttention: Long-context Attention in Near-Linear Time
Han, Insu, Jayaram, Rajesh, Karbasi, Amin, Mirrokni, Vahab, Woodruff, David P., Zandieh, Amir
We present an approximate attention mechanism named HyperAttention to address the computational challenges posed by the growing complexity of long contexts used in Large Language Models (LLMs). Recent work suggests that in the worst-case scenario, quadratic time is necessary unless the entries of the attention matrix are bounded or the matrix has low stable rank. We introduce two parameters which measure: (1) the max column norm in the normalized attention matrix, and (2) the ratio of row norms in the unnormalized attention matrix after detecting and removing large entries. We use these fine-grained parameters to capture the hardness of the problem. Despite previous lower bounds, we are able to achieve a linear time sampling algorithm even when the matrix has unbounded entries or a large stable rank, provided the above parameters are small. HyperAttention features a modular design that easily accommodates integration of other fast low-level implementations, particularly FlashAttention. Empirically, employing Locality Sensitive Hashing (LSH) to identify large entries, HyperAttention outperforms existing methods, giving significant speed improvements compared to state-of-the-art solutions like FlashAttention. We validate the empirical performance of HyperAttention on a variety of different long-context length datasets. For example, HyperAttention makes the inference time of ChatGLM2 50\% faster on 32k context length while perplexity increases from 5.6 to 6.3. On larger context length, e.g., 131k, with causal masking, HyperAttention offers 5-fold speedup on a single attention layer.
GIFT: Generative Interpretable Fine-Tuning Transformers
Savadikar, Chinmay, Song, Xi, Wu, Tianfu
We present GIFT (Generative Interpretable Fine-tuning Transformers) for fine-tuning pretrained (often large) Transformer models at downstream tasks in a parameter-efficient way with built-in interpretability. Our GIFT is a deep parameter-residual learning method, which addresses two problems in fine-tuning a pretrained Transformer model: Where to apply the parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) to be extremely lightweight yet sufficiently expressive, and How to learn the PEFT to better exploit the knowledge of the pretrained model in a direct way? For the former, we select the final projection (linear) layer in the multi-head self-attention of a Transformer model, and verify its effectiveness. For the latter, in contrast to the prior art that directly introduce new model parameters (often in low-rank approximation form) to be learned in fine-tuning with downstream data, we propose a method for learning to generate the fine-tuning parameters. Our GIFT is a hyper-Transformer which take as input the pretrained parameters of the projection layer to generate its fine-tuning parameters using a proposed Parameter-to-Cluster Attention (PaCa). The PaCa results in a simple clustering-based forward explainer that plays the role of semantic segmentation in testing. In experiments, our proposed GIFT is tested on the VTAB benchmark and the fine-grained visual classification (FGVC) benchmark. It obtains significantly better performance than the prior art. Our code is available at https://github.com/savadikarc/gift
Video Summarization: Towards Entity-Aware Captions
Ayyubi, Hammad A., Liu, Tianqi, Nagrani, Arsha, Lin, Xudong, Zhang, Mingda, Arnab, Anurag, Han, Feng, Zhu, Yukun, Liu, Jialu, Chang, Shih-Fu
Existing popular video captioning benchmarks and models deal with generic captions devoid of specific person, place or organization named entities. In contrast, news videos present a challenging setting where the caption requires such named entities for meaningful summarization. As such, we propose the task of summarizing news video directly to entity-aware captions. We also release a large-scale dataset, VIEWS (VIdeo NEWS), to support research on this task. Further, we propose a method that augments visual information from videos with context retrieved from external world knowledge to generate entity-aware captions. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach on three video captioning models. We also show that our approach generalizes to existing news image captions dataset. With all the extensive experiments and insights, we believe we establish a solid basis for future research on this challenging task.
Explaining Knock-on Effects of Bias Mitigation
Nizhnichenkov, Svetoslav, Nair, Rahul, Daly, Elizabeth, Mac Namee, Brian
In machine learning systems, bias mitigation approaches aim to make outcomes fairer across privileged and unprivileged groups. Bias mitigation methods work in different ways and have known "waterfall" effects, e.g., mitigating bias at one place may manifest bias elsewhere. In this paper, we aim to characterise impacted cohorts when mitigation interventions are applied. To do so, we treat intervention effects as a classification task and learn an explainable meta-classifier to identify cohorts that have altered outcomes. We examine a range of bias mitigation strategies that work at various stages of the model life cycle. We empirically demonstrate that our meta-classifier is able to uncover impacted cohorts. Further, we show that all tested mitigation strategies negatively impact a non-trivial fraction of cases, i.e., people who receive unfavourable outcomes solely on account of mitigation efforts. This is despite improvement in fairness metrics. We use these results as a basis to argue for more careful audits of static mitigation interventions that go beyond aggregate metrics.